Caspar David Friedrich
Poignant in their silence and almost holy in their systematic understatement, the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, a Romantic artist par excellence, are some of the best-known works produced in German painting after Dürer and before the Expressionists. Friedrich did not use the centuries-old longing for Italy as his subject-matter but instead turned to the indigenous landscape where he found haunting grandeur and unspoiled nature. His French contemporary, Jean Pierre David d’Angers, even spoke of the "tragedy of the landscape" that found expression in his work.
These landscapes are always based on symmetry and layering, and attempts have often been made to take the visual elements of the composition in a conventionally symbolic way—so the mountain range is interpreted as the symbol of God, the cliff as firm belief, and the dead tree as the symbol of death. If, however, the painter is considered less as a literal believer in the narrower sense and more as religious in the Protestant or even pantheistic tradition, then we will do more justice to his respect of nature. It is worth noting that Friedrich originally planned to include a figure in the posterior view to the left of the bare tree, but ended up leaving it out. As a result, the viewer is now completely alone before nature. It is also interesting that the drawings on which he based this freely composed image of an ideal Alpine land were nearly a decade old: Friedrich had no real need for them, as he wanted to paint what he saw with his inner eye.
We present today's work thanks to Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen - Neue Pinakothek Munich. :)
P.S. We couldn't have created our beautiful Weekly Desk Calendar without featuring Caspar David Friedrich's works in it! You can buy it here :)
P.P.S. Discover the art of Caspar David Friedrich through 10 magnificent paintings!