Caspar David Friedrich 17741840

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Caspar David Friedrich 1774-1840

• The Artist Caspar David Friedrich was born in
  1774 in Greifwald.
• Friedrich was one of the greatest exponents in
  European art of the
• Symbolic Landscape.

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Caspar David Friedrich 1774-1840

• Der Künstler bei der
• Arbeit.

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He studied at the Academy in Copenhagen
(1794-98), and subsequently settled in Dresden,
often traveling to other parts of Germany.
Friedrich's landscapes are based entirely on
those of northern Germany and are beautiful
renderings of trees, hills, harbors, morning
mists, and other light effects based on a close
observation of nature.
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• Der einsame Baum, 1823

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a walk at dusk
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Der Watzmann, 1824/25 
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DAS RIESENGEBIRGE
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Ein Mann und eine Frau in Betrachtung des Mondes,
1824
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Caspar David Friedrich1774-1840

• He was the first artist to create awe before
  nature and to infuse landscape and light with
  emotional and symbolic content

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Felsenlandschaft im Elbsangsteingebirge

• Friedrich aimed to produce a Christian art
  based in nature, divested of standard biblical
  imagery.
• "God is everywhere," he said, "in the
  smallest grain of sand."
• Friedrich's oeuvre encompasses scenes of
  ruined Gothic churches, cemeteries, desolate
  landscapes, and silent figures in vast spaces,
  all deeply spiritual and often melancholy.

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Abbey with Oak Trees (1810) A landscape showing a
ruined abbey in the snow, can be appreciated on
one level as a bleak, winter scene, but the
painter also intended the composition to
represent both the church shaken by the
Reformation and the transitoriness of earthly
things.

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CROSS IN THE MOUNTAINS

• In 1807 he began working in oils and
  immediately caused a sensation his Cross in the
  Mountains, installed in a private chapel, used
  landscape to evoke the spirit of the Crucifixion.
  In 1808 he exhibited one of his most
  controversial paintings, The Cross in the
  Mountains (Gemaldegalerie, Dresden), in
  which--for the first time in Christian art--an
  altarpiece was conceived in terms of a pure
  landscape. The cross, viewed obliquely from
  behind, is an insignificant element in the
  composition. More important are the dominant rays
  of the evening sun, which the artist said
  depicted the setting of the old, pre-Christian
  world. The mountain symbolizes an immovable
  faith, while the fir trees are an allegory of
  hope..Shocked by his use of secular genre for a
  religious purpose, critics accused Friedrich of
  sacrilege.

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DER WANDERER
Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, um 1818
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Eichbaum im Schnee, 1829

• Even some of Friedrich's apparently
  nonsymbolic paintings contain inner meanings,
  clues to which are provided either by the
  artist's writings or those of his literary
  friends.

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Caspar David Friedrich 1774-1840

• Die Kreidefelsen auf Rügen