Caspar David Friedrich: Life and Major Works

A painter in Dresden

Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 in Greifswald, on the Baltic coast. He trained in his hometown and then, from 1794, at the Copenhagen art academy. In 1798 he moved to Dresden, where he stayed for the rest of his life: from there, according to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, he made regular trips — to the island of Rügen from 1801 onward, with stops at Berlin, Neubrandenburg, Saxon Switzerland and Greifswald itself. In Dresden his career grew intertwined with the city’s art institutions: in 1816 Friedrich became a member of the Dresden Academy, which in 1824 appointed him professor of landscape painting. In 1808, partway through this period, he showed the painting Cross in the Mountains, also known as the Tetschen Altar, in his studio: the work set off a critical row that history remembers as the “Ramdohr dispute.”

The 1810 breakthrough, and the decline

In 1810, at 36, Friedrich won his first real public success by exhibiting a painting at the Berlin Academy, as Tate’s magazine recounts in a 2008 article. The fifteen-year-old crown prince of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm, liked two paintings shown on that occasion and bought them for 450 thalers.

The good run did not last. According to Tate Etc., Friedrich’s critical fortune fell fairly quickly after that 1810 success: the sources do not spell out why taste turned, only that his Romanticism went out of fashion. His output, the Städel Museum notes, also began to slow from 1826 onward, until his death in Dresden in 1840.

Caspar David Friedrich’s major paintings

The painting most associated with Friedrich’s name today, held at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, is Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which the museum dates to “around 1817.”

The same Hamburger Kunsthalle also holds The Sea of Ice, an oil on canvas measuring 96.7 by 126.9 centimeters dated by the museum to 1823/24, and Meadows near Greifswald, from 1821/22. The museum also keeps an earlier drawing, the Self-Portrait with Propped-Up Arm — pen and brown ink over pencil, dated to “around 1802.” A Hamburger Kunsthalle exhibition devoted to Friedrich has brought together more than 60 paintings and around 100 drawings by the artist.

Practical example: when a museum writes that a work is dated “around 1817,” it is not rounding out of laziness. It means no document carries the exact date, and the estimate comes from stylistic comparison with other works whose dates are certain.

The Abbey among Oak Trees and the Monk by the Sea

Two of Friedrich’s paintings form, according to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s official blog, probably the most famous pair in German Romanticism: Monk by the Sea and Abbey among Oak Trees, both held at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Between May 2013 and January 2016 the museum’s restoration department carried out a thorough technical and art-historical study of the two paintings. The examination found that about 97% of the original paint survived in the Monk and 98% in the Abbey, a high share for paintings over two centuries old. After the work, the two paintings were shown together in a special exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie, from January 22 to May 22, 2016.

Romantic ideas in Friedrich

Friedrich is tied to the Romantic idea of the “artist as monk” and to painting as inner vision: showing not only what one sees outdoors, but also what one sees “with the inner eye,” with the eyes closed, as Tate Etc. recounts. For the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Friedrich turned the landscape genre into art fit for a new era, making him the leading artist of German Romanticism.

That label makes more sense next to the wider picture of German culture at the time. The Romanticism in art that Friedrich belongs to runs alongside German Romanticism in literature, and has roots in the late-eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang movement. Set against the Neoclassicism that preceded it, Friedrich’s landscape is inner experience rather than an ideal of form. After his generation, German-speaking culture turned toward Biedermeier, a more domestic and less visionary mood.

A stigma and two rediscoveries

In the twentieth century Friedrich’s historical standing was rediscovered twice. The first time came with the Jahrhundertausstellung — the “Century Exhibition” — held in Berlin in 1906. The second came later, after his imagery had been used for propaganda purposes under Nazism: the modern reassessment resumed with the 1975 Hamburg exhibition curated by Werner Hofmann.