Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was the central painter of German Romanticism, whose landscapes treat nature as a religious subject. Born in Greifswald in Swedish Pomerania in 1774, the sixth of ten children of a soap and candle maker, he lost his mother at seven and several siblings in childhood. In 1787 his brother Johann Christoffer drowned in a frozen lake, in some accounts while trying to rescue Caspar, an event usually connected with the melancholy of his work. He studied at Copenhagen and settled in Dresden in 1798, working in sepia and pencil for years before turning to oil in his thirties. His first major controversy came with the Tetschen Altar, or Cross in the Mountains, of 1808 — a crucifix on a rocky summit against a sunset, painted as an altarpiece. Placing a landscape on an altar was widely attacked as an abuse of the genre, which was precisely the argument he was making: that nature could carry religious meaning directly. His compositions use devices that became his signature. The Rückenfigur — a figure seen from behind, contemplating the view — puts the viewer inside the picture, as in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog of around 1818. Vast empty middle grounds, fog, ruined abbeys, bare oaks and the moon recur throughout. His politics were German nationalist and anti-French during the Napoleonic occupation, and he painted figures in the forbidden old German dress. He married Caroline Bommer in 1818, which briefly warmed his palette. His reputation faded during his lifetime as tastes turned, and he died poor and partly paralysed in 1840, largely forgotten until the twentieth century.

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