Background
Friedrich was born in Greifswald, Germany, on September 5, 1774. The sixth of ten children, Caspar Friedrich was the son of Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, a candle-maker and soap boiler, and Sophie Dorothea Bechly.
Domstraße 11, 17489 Greifswald, Germany
Caspar Friedrich began his formal study of art in 1790 under Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald.
Kongens Nytorv 1, 1050 Copenhagen, Denmark
In 1794 Friedrich entered the prestigious Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Brühlsche Terrasse 1, 01067 Dresden, Germany
In October 1798 Friedrich enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden.
Domstraße 11, 17489 Greifswald, Germany
Caspar Friedrich began his formal study of art in 1790 under Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald.
Kongens Nytorv 1, 1050 Copenhagen, Denmark
In 1794 Friedrich entered the prestigious Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Brühlsche Terrasse 1, 01067 Dresden, Germany
In October 1798 Friedrich enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden.
Friedrich was born in Greifswald, Germany, on September 5, 1774. The sixth of ten children, Caspar Friedrich was the son of Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, a candle-maker and soap boiler, and Sophie Dorothea Bechly.
Caspar Friedrich had a fairly tragic childhood. His mother died in 1781 when he was just seven years old. The following year his sister Elisabeth passed away, while a second sister, Maria, died of typhus in 1791.
When he was 13, Friedrich experienced the greatest tragedy of his childhood that would haunt him for the rest of his life; his brother Johann Christoffer rescued Caspar David after he fell into the icy water while they were ice-skating, and drowned. Such guilt plagued Caspar Friedrich throughout his career, reappearing in his later artworks that concentrated on graveyards and themes of death.
Caspar Friedrich began his formal study of art in 1790 under Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald. Quistorp took his students on outdoor drawing excursions, which ignited Friedrich's love of depicting nature. Johann Quistorp also introduced his pupil to the work of German artist Adam Elsheimer whose religious subjects were often "overwhelmed" by landscapes. During this period the young artist also studied literature and aesthetics with Swedish poet, critic and professor Thomas Thorild.
In 1794 Friedrich entered the prestigious Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and there he produced copies of casts from antique sculptures and drew from life. Life in Copenhagen afforded the young artist access to the Royal Picture Gallery's collection of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. At the Academy, Friedrich studied under the direction of such teachers as Christian August Lorentzen and the landscape painter Jens Juel, who began moving away from the fading Neoclassical ideals and embracing the new Romantic aesthetic. In October 1798 Friedrich enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden.
Friedrich made the permanent move to Dresden in 1878. During this time the artist experimented with printmaking, etchings and woodcuts. By 1804 he had created 18 etchings and four woodcuts. However, he gravitated towards working with ink, watercolour and sepias. In 1797 he produced his first oil painting, Landscape with Temple Ruins, but he wouldn't return to this medium for a number of years.
Landscapes Caspar Friedrich's preferred subject, inspired by frequent trips to the Baltic coast, Bohemia, the Krkonoše and the Harz Mountains. Mainly based on the landscapes of northern Germany, his artworks depicted hills, harbours, woods, morning mists and other light effects. Friedrich developed his own technique of producing studies in pencil only to later add the atmospheric effects from memory when he sat down with the actual canvas.
Friedrich completed the first of his major artworks in 1808, at the age of 34. His Cross in the Mountains, known as the Tetschen Altar, an altarpiece panel said to have been commissioned for a family chapel in Tetschen, Bohemia, caused a great deal of controversy. Although it was coldly received, that work was Friedrich's first painting to receive wide publicity. At the same time, after Friedrich's marriage, there were obvious changes in the artist's paintings, as his canvasses displayed a new sense of levity, while his palette became brighter and less ascetic.
In autumn 1810, Friedrich presented his two paintings, "Monk at the Sea" and "Abbey in an Oak Forest" at a Berlin Academy exhibition. Both works were bought by the Prussian Crown Prince. Friedrich reached the pinnacle of recognition as an artist. His economic and social situation improved significantly.
Around this time, Caspar Friedrich found support from two main sources in Russia. In 1820, the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, at the request of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, visited the artist's studio and purchased a number of his paintings, becoming his devoted patron for many years. Soon after that, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor to Alexander II, met Caspar Friedrich in 1821 and found in him a soulmate. For decades Zhukovsky helped the artist both by buying his artworks himself and by recommending his art to the royal family.
However, his excitement with life did not last long. Soon, it was replaced with a more miserable theme. Friedrich's landscapes were decorated with details referring to the end of human life and he started to work on memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums. He even created designs for some of the funerary art in Dresden's cemeteries.
In 1824 Caspar Friedrich was appointed a professor of the Royal Dresden Art Academy (the present-day Dresden Academy of Fine Arts), but was not put in charge of the vacant position of teacher of the landscape painting class. Friedrich's reputation steadily declined over the final fifteen years of his life. As the ideals of Romanticism passed from fashion and were replaced, he experienced a decline in reputation and popularity. The man who just a few years earlier was commissioned by the Russian Grand Duke and the rest of the royal family, now found himself without patrons and living in poverty.
To make matters worse, a stroke in 1835 greatly reduced his ability to paint, resulting in his inability to work in oil. The majority of his later canvases were created in watercolour and sepia. In spite of the fact that his vision remained strong, he had lost the full strength of his hand. Nevertheless, he managed to produce a final "black painting," Seashore by Moonlight (1835-1836), described by William Vaughan, an art historian, as the "darkest of all his shorelines, in which richness of tonality compensates for the lack of his former finesse."
Soon after his stroke, the Russian royal family bought a number of his earlier artworks, and the proceeds allowed him to travel to Teplitz, today's Czech Republic, to recover. During the mid-1830s, Caspar Friedrich started a series of portraits and returned to observing himself in nature. By 1838, he was able only of working in a small format. The last years of his life, Caspar Friedrich and his family were living in poverty and grew increasingly dependent for support on the charity of friends.
Caspar Friedrich was a prolific artist who produced more than 500 attributed artworks, the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes. In the late 1970s, Friedrich became an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.
His reputation as an artist was firmly established when he won a prize in 1805 at the Weimar competition organised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Friedrich's symbolic and anti-classical paintings influenced many of his contemporaries, notably Johann Christian Dahl, as well as later artists such as Arnold Bocklin, the Russian painters Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Shishkin. His artworks also inspired a number of 20th-century painters, such as Surrealist Max Ernst and the American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko.
One of his greatest achievements as an artist was Friedrich's ability to create emotionally-charged views which help to connect the viewer with the spirituality of nature. His depiction of various light forms, particularly sunrise and moonlight was outstanding, as was his ability to convey the absolute stillness and solitude of the forest.
Respected by art historians and collectors throughout the West, Friedrich is now seen as one of the greatest and most original view artists of the early 19th century, who had a major influence on the development of Western landscape art.
The University of Greifswald in his home city named the art department in his honour, which is now Caspar-David-Friedrich-Institut.
Works by Caspar David Friedrich can be found in the world's best art museums, including the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, Germany, the National Gallery, London, the Museum Oskar Reinhart, Switzerland, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, etc.
Wolves in the forrest in front of a cave
The Watzmann
Forrest in the end of the autumn
Landscape with rainbow
The Sea of Ice
Man and Woman
Chalk Cliffs on Rügen
The Monk by the Sea
Rogen landscape in Putbus
The Cemetery Entrance
Two Men Contemplating the Moon
Funeral scene at the beach
Woman in the cloack
Graveyard under Snow
Rocky Ravine
Trees in the snow
Woman on the beach of Ruegen
Pines at the waterfall
Morning in the Sudeten Mountains
Hills and Ploughed Fields near Dresden
Megalithic grave
The Tree of Crows
Fog
Fog in the Elbe Valley
Early snow
View from the Artists Studio, Window on Left
Elbschiff in early morning fog
Ships at the port of Greifswald
Evening on the Baltic Sea
Landscape with Oak Trees and a Hunter
Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, Reading
Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altar)
Flat country shank at Bay of Greifswald
A Northern Spring Landscape
The summer
Owl on a grave
Evening
Sea beach with fisherman (The fisherman)
Solitary Tree
Morning in Riesengebirge
The Riesengbirge
Two Men Contemplating the Moon
By the townwall
Easter Morning
Coast Scene
Das Eismeer
Clipping floe
Woman with a candlestick
Boy sleeping on a grave
Ships sailing off in the morning
Boats in the Harbour at Evening
Drifting Clouds
View of a harbour
Churchyard Gate
Monastery ruins in the snow
Winter landscape
Fishing boat between two rocks on the beach of the Baltic Sea
Twilight at seaside
The dreamer
Carl Vogelvon Vogelstein
Fog
Neubrandenburg
Mountainous River Landscape
The stages of life
View from the Small Warmbrunn Sturmhaube
Self Portrait
The wanderer above the sea of fog
Basel
Rock arch in the Uttewalder Grund
Oak tree in the snow
Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds
City at Moonrise
Port by Moonlight
Winter
Afternoon
Evening
Giant Mountains Landscape with Rising Fog
Winter Light
Clipping iceberg
Landscape with a male figure
Dolmen in snow
Fir Trees in the Snow
West facade of the ruins of Eldena
Boat on the Shor. Moonrise
Two Men by the Sea
Plowed field
Largeness
Grave by the Sea
Caroline Sponholz
Morning in the Mountains
Greifswald market
Cross and church in the mountains
Self-portrait as a young man
Bohemian Landscape with Mount Milleschauer
Morning
Sailing ship
Cross in the forrest
Inside the Forest under the moonlight
Sea with ships
Bohemian Landscape
Ernst Theodor Johann Bruckner
Abbey in the oak forest
Eldena
Cross in the Mountains
Chalk Cliffs at Ruegen
Woman on the stairs
Canyon in the resin
On board of a Sailing Ship
Swans among the reeds at the first Morgenro
Landscape with the Rosenberg in Bohemian Switzerland
Greifswald in moonlight
Coffin and Grave
Study of heads, figures, and foliage
A Walk at Dusk
Bohemian Landscape with Mount Millsheauer
Luise Sponholz
Landscape in the Riesengebirge
Peaks with clouds
Day
Morning mist in the mountains
Ship in the Arctic Ocean
Friedrich was raised in a Lutheran creed. He was a highly religious person throughout his life; he even dedicated a number of artworks to religious themes.
Caspar Friedrich was an anti-French German nationalist. He had adverse feelings towards Napoleon. His blatant patriotism in his art would later attract the attention of the Nazi regime.
Friedrich had a chance to meet Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, a theologian who believed nature to be a revelation of God, an idea that would remain with Caspar Friedrich throughout his life.
His views, as well as art, were greatly influenced by anti-Napoleonic poetry of Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner, and the patriotic literature of Adam Müller and Heinrich von Kleist.
Quotations:
"What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer."
"The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead."
"I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot."
"The pure, frank sentiments we hold in our hearts are the only truthful sources of art."
"The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand; there I represented it in the reeds."
"The feelings of another person should never be imposed upon us as a law."
"A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling."
"All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it."
"You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company."
"The eye and fantasy feel more attracted by nebulous distance than by that which is close and distinct in front of us."
Friedrich was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, also known as Berlin Academy, in 1810. He joined the Royal Academy of Arts in Dresden in 1816. In 1828 Friedrich became a member of the newly founded Saxon Art Association.
Friedrich was exceptionally gifted as an observer and interpreter of nature. During the last years of his life, Caspar Friedrich came to be viewed as an eccentric and melancholy character, out of touch with the times. By 1820, he was living as a hermit and was described by friends as the "most solitary of the solitary."
Isolated, he spent long periods of the day and night walking alone through woods and fields, often beginning his strolls before sunrise. That's how the artist explained it himself, "I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am."
Physical Characteristics:
Friedrich had a pale and withdrawn appearance; it caused the creation of the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North."
Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803-1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826, leading to noticeable thematic shifts in his works.
Quotes from others about the person
Johan Christian Clausen Dahl: "Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic... They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented."
Kenneth Clark: "[Friedrich] worked in the frigid technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a school of modern painting."
William Vaughan: "[Friedrich is] a believer who struggled with doubt, a celebrator of beauty haunted by darkness. In the end, he transcends interpretation, reaching across cultures through the compelling appeal of his imagery. He has truly emerged as a butterfly - hopefully one that will never again disappear from our sight."
Karl von Kügelgen: "Even the things most necessary to painting - the box of paints, the bottles of linseed oil, and the oil-rag - were moved to the adjoining room, because Frederick [Friedrich] was of the opinion that any objects would disturb his inner world of imagination."
Carl Gustav Carus: "He [Friedrich] never made sketches, cartoons, or colour studies for his paintings, because he stated (and certainly he was not entirely wrong), that such aids chill the imagination somewhat. He did not begin to paint an image until it stood, living, in the presence of his soul."
Carl Gustav Carus: "Friedrich, with his somewhat stiff and diffuse but highly poetic manner, was the first artist - in painting as a whole, but more especially in landscape painting - whoever assailed and shook up the philistines of Dresden."
Caspar Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a dyer from Dresden, on January 21, 1818. The marriage produced three children. Their first child, Emma, was born in 1820.
Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847) was a German painter, who was best known for his Biedermeier-style interior paintings.
