FRIEDRICH, Caspar David

This drawing represents the father of the artist.

Friedrich can be regarded as the consummate master of early Romantic landscape painting. His work would have sufficed by itself to form our notion of Romantic painting. The symbolic language of his landscapes derives its vocabulary from the study of nature, and is based on a meditative internalisation of the experiences of the senses.

This painting conveys Friedrich’s impressions of the countryside in the Bohemian mountains south of Teplitz. Our gaze is taken to the right to Mount Milleschauer, and then, because of the painting’s symmetrical structure, to the equally sweeping profile of a second mountain, the Kletschen, to the left. The eye returns from the bluish-green silhouette of these distant mountains to the luscious green sloping pastures at the front. From there it travels down the path to the low-built house in the valley lying, half-concealed, amidst the trees and bushes; the presence of human life is revealed by the column of smoke rising from its chimney. Or we may climb in our minds up the hill to the right of the house, which becomes an increasingly pale yellowish-green with height, perhaps to gain an even better perspective of the landscape. The ease with which the beginning of this path in the foreground takes us on a tour of the scene seems to correspond with the tranquil state of mind brought about by the painting, and accords perfectly with its depiction of nature. With its wonderful delicacy and its relaxed, serene mood, the painting must be one of the most beautiful landscapes in German art.

The painting was painted in recollection of the artist’s honeymoon. We may assume that the figures are the painter, his wife, and his brother Christian. Again a double meaning is apparent, and the first impression of light and happiness is counteracted on a closer inspection. The three have ventured right up to the edge of the precipice. The man on the right is relying on the bush to prevent him from falling, while the woman is securing her hold by sitting down, and is also clutching a bush while she points down. The oddest figure is the painter himself; his hat seems to have fallen in the grass or been tossed down in haste. He has crawled to the edge, felling his way carefully, as if wishing to plumb the dizzying depth into which his companion is pointing. The double meaning between recollected experience and the “profound depth” of the symbols of life is evident. The view of the sea with the two sailing boats looks like a chasm that has opened beneath the figures, framed by the cliffs and the intertwining tops of the tress.

With this daring construction Friedrich has succeeded in making a visual combination of two extremes: the plunging ravine with its view of the sea and at the same time the endless horizon.

If nothing more were known of the painter, this painting, the so-called ‘Tetschen Altar’ would command attention for its boldness in creating a devotional image from the materials of landscape. It is both the first masterpiece of one of the greatest Romantic landscape painters and a manifesto for the art of landscape itself. It exemplifies two important achievements of early Romanticism: the elevation of nature to a kind of religion, and of landscape to equal or surpass history painting.

The 34-year-old painter was inordinately proud of the work. It was the largest he had painted so far, in a medium in which he was still far from proficient, and he had designed the frame himself - a Gothic arch with the eye of God and the wheat and vine of the Eucharist. He had intended the picture as a gift to the Swedish king Adolphus IV, in recognition of his resistance to Napoleon, but was persuaded instead to sell it to Count von Thun-Hohenstein for his castle in Tetschen, Bohemia. With its splendid frame it was transformed from political gesture to religious image, but still it remained a landscape. Nature itself was imbued with religious feeling.

The painting’s carved frame is based on a concept by Friedrich, but was executed by one of his friends, the sculptor Gottlieb Christian K�hn.

If nothing more were known of the painter, this painting, the so-called ‘Tetschen Altar’ would command attention for its boldness in creating a devotional image from the materials of landscape. It is both the first masterpiece of one of the greatest Romantic landscape painters and a manifesto for the art of landscape itself. It exemplifies two important achievements of early Romanticism: the elevation of nature to a kind of religion, and of landscape to equal or surpass history painting.

The dolmen portrayed here is probably one which stood near G�tzkow, and which was removed between 1825 and 1829. Together with his drawing master Quistorp, Friedrich made several excursions to prehistoric burial sites.

Having barely changed at all right into the 1820s, Friedrich’s style now began to show signs of a subtle evolution. His formerly somewhat reserved, dry, often monochrome use of colour now began to give way to a more differentiated palette. Passages of glaze are complemented by areas of impasto; the colour range is frequently enhanced with very light values, and Friedrich’s handling of paint becomes looser and somewhat more spontaneous. English influences, from Constable or others working in a similar vein, may account for Friedrich’s interest in cloud studies. Drifting Clouds is an example of these studies.

This small composition is probably identical to a work recorded in Dresden in 1859 and described as portraying a Riesengebirge landscape with the source of the Elbe.

Friedrich’s subject matter is drawn from nature but is not an objective vision of it. Rather, it is a mystic one, imbued with a symbolic character. His pictures often show figures seen from behind and contemplating the landscape.

English influences, from Constable or others working in a similar vein, may account for Friedrich’s interest in cloud studies, as evidenced by this painting, a small oil study on cardboard which is highly innovative, almost avant-garde in character.

After his marriage in 1818 people assume a more prominent role in Friedrich’s pictures and become considerably larger. Figures also appear more frequently in pairs closely bound by friendship or love, etching themselves forever on the memory in images of supreme potency, such as Evening Landscape with Two Men.

This painting has the delicacy of Chinese painting on silk in its silent capture of rolling mist. Antlerlike bare branches grouped in the foreground suggest a flock of deer.

A symbolic and heavy sadness lies over the Graveyard under Snow. We are now looking from inside the cemetery across the grave to the open gate, which is surrounded by a latticework of bare branches. The stormy sky is dead and empty. The open grave in the foreground has prompted much speculation. Some have suggested that it is intended as the future resting-place of the artist.

On 26 June 1835 Friedrich suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed in the arms and legs. After an initial period during which he was confined to bed, he went to Teplice to convalesce. He was from now on virtually unable to paint in oils and had to restrict himself to drawings. His sepia drawing Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl is symptomatic of the obsession with which Friedrich tracked death in the last years of his life. The eyes of the exaggeratedly large, surreal night bird glint in the light of the moon which floats like a nimbus above the owl’s head.

Visible in the background is Cape Arkona on the island of R�gen, although in a different landscape setting. It is possible that the owl, while undoubtedly a bird of death, here also represents a symbol of wisdom.

In 1794 Friedrich went to study at the highly-regarded Copenhagen Academy. He drew plaster casts of classical sculptures and studied Dutch landscape painting in the art galleries of the Danish metropolis.

Of the few drawings, watercolours and gouaches that survive from Friedrich’s Copenhagen period, a number already reveal a sensitive eye for nature. Landscape with Pavilion, a watercolour drawing which arose around 1797, shows a motif from a landscape garden near Copenhagen. The nervous line and the pastel palette remain somewhat reminiscent of the Rococo. The subject testifies to the emotional emphasis which had always been associated in Europe with the English landscape garden and which, in the years 1779-1785, was explored in particular in Danish gardens by the garden architect C. C. L. Hirschfeld.

As the atmospheric expression of a sentimental love of nature, the English landscape garden numbered amongst the sources of inspiration for many pre-Romantic and Romantic currents in Europe.

Friedrich only rarely incorporated aspects of his own life in his painting, but where he did, the statement loses nothing of his objective force. After his marriage to Carline Bommer in 1818, he produced paintings that include the figure of a woman. In the Man and Woman Looking at the Moon Friedrich has portrayed himself and his wife gazing at the moon in Romantic wonderment. This painting is probably one of the most ardent acknowledgements of their relationship. There is a variant on the motif, Two Men Looking at the Moon (Dresden), painted in c. 1820.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 6 minutes):

Franz Schubert: An den Mond (To the Moon) (Goethe) D 296

Friedrich’s native town becomes a symbol of longing for a better world. The prancing horses, the geese and the pond reflecting the sky reinforce the sense of idyll.

The Cross in the Mountains (The Tetschen Altar) brought Friedrich to the attention of a wider public. Probably at no other point in his life did Friedrich enjoy more profound appreciation and greater admiration than in the years around 1810. Two landscapes in particular were responsible for thrusting Friedrich into the limelight. In 1810 they were exhibited as pendants at the Academy exhibition in Berlin, where they were purchased by the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William. These two paintings were The Monk by the Sea and the Abbey in the Oakwood.

The Monk by the Sea is undoubtedly a masterpiece in Friedrich’s oeuvre and the boldest picture within German Romanticism as a whole. The theme: the tiny figure of a man set against a natural landscape divided into three horizontal zones of colour. Its composition breaks with all traditions. There is no longer any perspective depth whatsoever. At the bottom of the picture, the whitish sand dunes making up the narrow strip of shoreline rise at an obtuse angle towards the left. At their apex, the tiny figure of a man robed in black is visible from behind - the only vertical in the picture. There is no other staffage; even the two sailing boats which Friedrich had originally envisaged on either side of the man he subsequently painted over. The oppressively dark zone of the sea meets an extremely low horizon. Some five-sixths of the canvas is given over to the diffuse structure of the cloudy sky. Because all lines lead out of the picture, infinity becomes the true subject of the painting. In the awareness of his smallness, the man, in whose place the viewer is meant to imagine himself, reflects upon the power of the universe.

The official recognition, indicated by the royal purchase, came as a surprise, for the canvas had initially been met with bemusement, even from Marie von K�gelgen who had earlier admired his work. When she saw it in 1809, Marie described it to her friend Friederike Volkmann:

“A vast endless expanse of sky … still, no wind, no moon, no storm - indeed a storm would have been some consolation for then one would at least see life and movement somewhere. On the unending sea there is no boat, no ship, not even a sea monster, and in the sand not even a blade of grass, only a few gulls float in the air and make the loneliness even more desolate and horrible.”

In the 1820s and 1830s, the Russian court purchased a number of works by Friedrich at the suggestion of the poet and state councillor Zhukovsky. These included the beautiful, large-format Moonrise by the Sea, which is dated fairly unanimously to around 1821. A contemporary description of the painting says that two men have clambered across the rocks a long way out into the shallows and appear to be waiting for a ship. Their two female companions are seated more in the foreground. Two massive anchors take the place of vegetation, which is here reduced simply to some saltwater plants.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Auf Dem Wasser Zu Singen (To Be Sung On The Water), Franz Liszt’s transcription

Evening now replies to morning. The annual round subjugates humankind to its law. Distances can no longer be gauged in rational terms, so that water, ships, moon and sky open up a dream world extending between yearning and melancholy, between near and far, between this world and the universe. Looking becomes meditative contemplation.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 6 minutes):

Franz Schubert: An den Mond (To the Moon) (Goethe) D 296

This large-format painting was probably purchased by the future Alexander II of Russia, whose collection also included Moonrise by the Sea (also in the Hermitage). Its vast panorama has often been interpreted as a vision of the hereafter, although the pastoral staffage in the foreground lends the whole the quality of an idyll and the rocky terrain can in fact be accessed via the path that runs at least as far as the steep cliffs in the middle ground. Opening up in front of the tiny shepherds on the rocky pinnacle, so we assume, is a view down into the dizzying depths below and beyond the track and cliffs into the infinite distance - a view yielding an impression of the sublime.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Edvard Grieg: Peter Gynt Suite No 1, Op, 46 (‘Morning Mood’)

With his friend Kersting he had made a tour of the mountainous area near Dresden known as ‘Saxon Switzerland’, in the summer of 1810. Morning in the Riesengebirge, painted shortly afterwards, is another exposition of his theme of the cross on a peak. It may be seen as a sort of continuation of the Tetschen Altar. The planes of earth and sky, representing the bodily and the infinite, are bridged by the crucifix, lit by the morning sun.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Edvard Grieg: Peter Gynt Suite No 1, Op, 46 (‘Morning Mood’)

In 1830 Friedrich was commissioned by Alexander, the heir to the Russian throne, to produce four transparent pictures. Executed on transparent paper and lit from behind in a dark room, the pictures would be viewed as an ensemble to the accompaniment of music. In 1835 the four transparent pictures were dispatched to St Petersburg together with the equipment needed to display them - unfortunately, they are now lost. In Kassel, however, a similar example survives, a Mountainous River Landscape painted on both sides of a single piece of transparent paper. When correctly lit, one side reveals itself to be a version of the composition seen in daylight, while the other side portrays the same scene at night.

In 1830 Friedrich was commissioned by Alexander, the heir to the Russian throne, to produce four transparent pictures. Executed on transparent paper and lit from behind in a dark room, the pictures would be viewed as an ensemble to the accompaniment of music. In 1835 the four transparent pictures were dispatched to St Petersburg together with the equipment needed to display them - unfortunately, they are now lost. In Kassel, however, a similar example survives, a Mountainous River Landscape painted on both sides of a single piece of transparent paper. When correctly lit, one side reveals itself to be a version of the composition seen in daylight, while the other side portrays the same scene at night.

Soaring high above the town, which is seen in silhouette from the north-east, is the slender spire of the Marienkirche. The hilly landscape on the horizon, above which grandiose banks of clouds unfurl into an enormous sky, is the product of pure imagination. This has led some art historians to conclude that the work is not intended as a straightforward veduta, but as a glorification of Gothic Neubrandenburg. The two men on the track in the foreground stand motionless beside what is probably a dolmen and contemplate the cityscape in the distance. Opinions differ as to whether the lighting conditions represent sunrise or sunset. Like the bushes shedding their leaves in the foreground, the migratory birds in the sky, probably storks, serve as pointers to approaching winter and thereby to death.

Clouds of smoke are billowing from windows and from the roof of the Marienkirche, part of which is missing. Flames even appear to be leaping from one of the windows. There are no records to say that this was an actual fire that Friedrich might have witnessed, however.

While the majority of German artists lived in Rome, particularly in the early nineteenth century, or undertook extended visits to Italy, a few still managed to resist the pull of the South. One of these was Caspar David Friedrich, who studied in northern Germany and Denmark, and then, apart from a few trips within Germany and Bohemia, chose to settle in Dresden and never left it. Friedrich dedicated himself almost exclusively to painting landscapes, but his main objective was not the depiction of natural phenomena. The exact observation of nature was merely the basis for his symbolic content, which used the medium of landscape to contemplate the human condition and man’s relationship with nature and with God. Friedrich’s small painting, Oak in the snow, is based on accurate observation, and yet the image of the gnarled oak tree also has symbolic significance.

The oak is a symbol of the pre-Christian world. The fallen branches denote the meaningless of heathen existence, while signs of spring in the melting snow and the blue sky herald new life in Christ.

This painting, with its bold composition, was probably purchased by the future Tsar Nicholas I in 1820, when he visited Friedrich in Dresden.

As if we ourselves were on board, our eyes are directed towards the prow of the boat, where a couple are sitting. They are holding hands and gazing at the distant city ahead, its church spires and buildings emerging hazily from the mist. The woman is Caroline, the artist’s wife, and the man is probably intended to be Friedrich. The artist is possibly referring here to the motif of the ship of life, to the notion of life as a journey from this world to the next, as familiar from Christian pictorial and literary tradition. The picture is dominated, however, by the emotional span between the narrowness of the boat, the way in which it seems to be gliding soundlessly forwards, strangely without waves, and the longed-for horizon. Dominant, too, is the bold composition with its slightly offset verticals (the mast), its horizontals (the distant shore) and its foreshortened view of the wedge-like front of the ship. It would be several decades before a close-up view of this kind would be encountered again in the work of the Impressionists.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Auf Dem Wasser Zu Singen (To Be Sung On The Water), Franz Liszt’s transcription

In this drawing, which Friedrich showed to acclaim at the 7th Exhibition of Art in Weimar, nature assumes the function of a consecrated space.

Friedrich’s emotionally saturated imagery, the visual language of atmospheric and “ideal” painting alike, stood in blunt contradiction to the Realist tendencies emerging in Germany at that time, as seen above all in the work of the D�sseldorf School. Friedrich emphatically rejected pure fidelity to life, the mere imitation of what was perceived by the human eye. Only on a few occasions does Friedrich appear to have attempted a more realistic approach, as for example in the unusually dramatic Rocky Ravine. Untamed nature is here portrayed with a descriptive detail that betrays the influence of Friedrich’s fellow artist Dahl, who had specialized in precisely such a style.

The sandstone formation in the background stands on the Neurathen the Elbsandsteingebirge mountains. The rocks are portrayed larger than in real life, and Friedrich has introduced a deep ravine beneath the tallest pinnacle.

This painting is closely related to The Sea of Ice (Kunsthalle, Hamburg) and it was probably executed only shortly afterwards. It probably depicts the western tip of the Isle of Wight off Bournemouth, a view which Friedrich may have known from engravings. The rocky needles in the sea recall the ice formations in the Hamburg painting.

To the marine genre, long popular among Dutch and Flemish masters, Friedrich adds a haunting sense of mystery, as seen in this picture.

In his self-portrait, Friedrich represented himself as a serious, thoughtful man. His self-confident, interrogating gaze penetrates the viewer in order to expose his innermost images. By placing the head and the eyes in the very centre of the depiction, the intellectual contribution to artistic creation is emphasized, while the classical drapery removes the subject from the context of his own age.

The Cross in the Mountains (The Tetschen Altar) brought Friedrich to the attention of a wider public. Probably at no other point in his life did Friedrich enjoy more profound appreciation and greater admiration than in the years around 1810. Two landscapes in particular were responsible for thrusting Friedrich into the limelight. In 1810 they were exhibited as pendants at the Academy exhibition in Berlin, where they were purchased by the Prussian king Frederick William III. These two paintings were The Monk by the Sea and the Abbey in the Oakwood.

The Abbey in the Oakwood is an expression of grief at the loss of a great past. The artist has chosen to depict an architectural ruin; it may testify to the sublimity of the past, but it is a monument in a graveyard.

The Napoleonic invasion of Germany and the consequent War of Liberation had added a patriotic dimension to Friedrich’s subjects of north German ecclesiastical buildings in ruins or, in imagination, raised again. While the essential message of the Abbey in the Oak-wood of 1810 is the passing of the earthly life, its fog-bound ruin and blasted, leafless trees inevitably evoked the contemporary state of Germany.

The painting was exhibited with its companion picture, the Monk by the Sea. This suggests the hope of resurrection in its bright sky, in contrast to the dark clouds that loom above the figure on his Baltic shore.

When Friedrich resumed working in oil following the provisional end of his illness, there lingered a dark shadow which also afflicted his private life - a forewarning of the stroke he would later suffer and which would hasten his death. The motif of the graveyard now began to appear with greater frequency in his oeuvre, as for example in the painting The Cemetery Entrance, which was probably commenced in 1825 but which remained unfinished. The imposing gateway is based on that of the Trinitatis cemetery in Dresden.

A symbolic and heavy sadness lies over this painting. At an exhibition mounted by the Bremer Kunst-Verein in 1833, the painting bore the title Priessnitz Churchyard near Dresden. Friedrich and Dahl are known to have made drawings of this cemetery in 1824.

The French occupation of Germany was also the period of the painter’s first success, much of which he owed to his adoption of specifically nationalist themes. The Gothic church, ruined or decayed, acquired a particular meaning for him, as did the German forest. When in 1814 he celebrated the expulsion of the French, it was with The Chasseur in the Forest, a haunting image of a solitary French dragoon lost in a wood of evergreens. It is a compassionate picture: the invader’s fate is just and inevitable, but also sad, and seems to belong to the same higher natural destiny as the forest’s vigorous growth.

Visions of Gothic architecture appear regularly in the artist’s work from Winter Landscape with Church (1811, Dortmund), rising like a man-made enigma in a mysterious landscape scenario. An example is provided by The Cross in the Mountains, which can be dated fairly confidently to 1812, and which has long been viewed as a further development of the Tetschen Altar. The rough and rocky terrain of the foreground surrounds a spring, behind which, within an indeterminate space, rise a dark wall of fir trees and the gabled fa�ade of a Gothic church, reduced to a shadowy silhouette. A wayside calvary marks the border between foreground and back- ground. The logic of space and time seems to have been abandoned in this painting in favour of the unreality of a dream.

This painting, depicting an area of pastureland crossed by tree-lined avenues just outside Dresden, portrayed in masterly fashion from an alienating angle, is an example of Friedrich’s final phase of full mastery. He uses an exquisite palette to evoke a particularly solemn evening mood and thereby lends a rhythmic impulse to the foreground with rivulets of water glinting in the sunset.

With the richness of its palette, the beauty of its composition and its sonorous atmosphere, this impressive painting is a true masterpiece in the history of European landscape painting.

The North Sea in Moonlight is one of the artist’s major works. A wrecked boat in the foreground, a lifeless nocturnal landscape, the cold light of the moon shrouded in clouds are filled with feelings of anxiety, but not of hopelessness.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 16 minutes):

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor op. 27 No. 2 (Moonlight)

Friedrich was preoccupied by the passage of time. The ages of man are mirrored by the seasonal cycle, and his vivid representations of winter snow and leafless trees contain the promise of spring growth, as in The Oak Tree in the Snow, which is both an image of striking naturalism and a complex allegory, painted late in Friedrich’s life in a mood of retrospection. The German oak, a symbol of strength, is cruelly chopped and denuded, like Germany itself for much of the painter’s life; its dead branches speak of a lost past. Yet at its roots spring new leaves, and the blue sky, reflected in the icy water, brings hope of renewal. This picture needs no figures, for the oak is really a collective figure of the German people.

Oak trees run like a leitmotif throughout Friedrich’s oeuvre, often in conjunction with a dolmen. They are a reminder of the artist’s personal roots and are at the same time charged with nationalist sentiment.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 22 minutes):

Mendelssohn: Songs

For Friedrich, the liberation of his country presaged a period of happy stability, in which he was elected to the Dresden Academy in 1816 and married two years later. The removal of the stimulus of patriotic resistance rather diminished Friedrich’s symbolic rigour. He developed a broader handling of paint, and made a number of studies of clouds and natural phenomena. The change of interpretation and technique can be clearly seen in this painting.

With his friend Kersting he had made a tour of the mountainous area near Dresden known as ‘Saxon Switzerland’, in the summer of 1810. Morning in the Riesengebirge, painted shortly afterwards, is another exposition of his theme of the cross on a peak. In this later picture of the early 1830s, Friedrich recollected his mountain tour in terms of pure landscape, with only a shepherd to inhabit it; the zones of earth and heaven are harmonized by the melding vapour of morning mist.

The ruins of the Cistercian monastery of Eldena appear regularly in Friedrich’s oeuvre and convey a religious symbolism and a message of transience. At the same time, the motif also expresses the painter’s deep attachment to his native region.

This painting may be understood as a sort of programmatic statement and resume of Friedrich’s aims and intentions. A source of inspiration for the painting was the polar expedition mounted by William Edward Parry from 1819 to 1820 in search of the North-west Passage. The painting’s icy palette corresponds to the Arctic setting. It is undoubtedly one of the artist’s masterpieces, yet the radical nature of its composition and subject was greeted in its own day with incomprehension and rejection. The picture remained unsold right up to Friedrich’s death in 1840.

In the painting, now often called The Wreck of the Hope, the painter imbued the subject with unsurpassable dramatic intensity. The particular feature of this work is that the drama has already happened. The huge towering pinnacles are the slowly moving icebergs that have long become fixed here. The bold attempt by man to burst the bounds of his allotted sphere ends in death.

When the artist was 13, an accident occurred, that, perhaps subconsciously, formed part of the shadow that seemed to darken his temperament throughout his life. While ice skating he was saved from drowning by his younger brother Christoph, but Christoph himself drowned in the icy water before his eyes. It can be hardly denied that Friedrich’s various “sea of ice” paintings must be seen in relation to this traumatic experience.

The Gothic cityscape combines buildings from Halle, Stralsund, Neubrandenburg and Greifswald. The two women in old-German costume may be Friedrich’s wife Caroline and his sister-in-law Elisabeth.

The Tree of Crows is pessimistic in mood, it is a painting founded upon strong colour contrasts. The hillock in the centre of the composition probably represents one of the dolmens on R�gen; the island’s bluffs and long, narrow reef running far out into the sea are visible in the left-hand background. The bare oak tree with its bizarrely twisted branches goes back to studies made considerably earlier in Friedrich’s career. In contrast to the ravaged trees around it, it obstinately stands up to every storm. A striking note within the painting is sounded by the red of the stumps and tree debris, which together with the crows or ravens announce disaster and death.

Caspar David Friedrich, protagonist of German Romantic art and one of the greatest of European landscapists, painted his famous Wanderer above the Mists in c. 1818. It embodies the quintessence of the principles of the Romantic landscape aesthetic, showing a lonely figure confronting nature in astonished reverence. In the foreground we see the dark silhouette of a rocky promontory, where a wayfarer stands looking out over dense fog and spires of rock in the valley towards distant mountains and peaks. High above these stretches a bank of clouds. The scenic excerpt is dominated by the deep space of a vista, prompting us to wonder what lies beyond.

Friedrich’s figures who habitually turn their backs to gaze into the horizon or stare from windows with rapt attention are images of the artist. His Wanderer, frock-coated and stick in hand, has climbed to a rocky peak above swirling mountain mists; the viewer looks with his eyes, the angle of vision being exactly aligned to their level in the picture space. The foreground, the conventional plateau to give the viewer a fix on the subject, has been entirely dispensed with.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Der Wanderer, Franz Liszt’s transcription

Throughout his life, Friedrich demonstrated himself to be closely attached to his home. His numerous trips and walking tours to central Germany, Silesia, Bohemia, Greifswald, Neubrandenburg and R�gen never actually took him very far away. He never visited southern Germany, for example, and his painting of The Watzmann - a mountain near Berchtesgaden, portrayed here rising like a Gothic cathedral in its stone majesty - was inspired by a watercolour by his pupil August Heinrich. It also rivalled a painting by Adrian Ludwig Richter of the same title, which went on show in Dresden in 1824 and was intended to back up Richter’s application for the professorship in landscape painting at the Academy, the post to which Friedrich also aspired.

Despite its apparent fidelity to nature, the painting reveals a somewhat fantastical element in its mixture of different geological formations and its unnatural ratios of scale.

After his marriage in 1818 people assume a more prominent role in Friedrich’s pictures and become considerably larger. Figures also appear more frequently in pairs closely bound by friendship or love, etching themselves forever on the memory in images of supreme potency. One of the most beautiful examples of such paintings of two figures is Two Men Contemplating the Moon.

In this ethereal painting, human and natural symbolism are subtly interwoven. The moon, an old Christian sign of hope, gleams from behind a withered tree, watched by two men, perhaps the artist and a pupil, in the ‘old German’ costume favoured by the resistance movement during the years of Napoleonic occupation. Painted after this threat had lifted, the picture links past, present and future through the cycles of time and season and the intercession of their human observers.

In response to demand from his clientele, Friedrich executed several copies of this composition, a number of which remain in private collection. He took up the motif again, in slightly varied form, in the painting Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (c. 1824, Nationalgalerie, Berlin), in which he has perhaps portrayed himself and his wife in this scene of Romantic wonderment.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 6 minutes):

Franz Schubert: An den Mond (To the Moon) (Goethe) D 296

Friedrich’s people are often portrayed in a rapt contemplation of the mysteries of their own passion as reflected by water’s moon-struck rise and fall, extended by the passage of time and tide. His seascapes combine intimacy and grandeur in unprecedented fashion. In the surreal Two Men by the Sea, each viewer is the other’s clone.

Playing a prominent role in Friedrich’s oeuvre are the themes of the sea, harbours and ships. Such motifs seem to have touched him deeply. The View of a Harbour may have been inspired by the harbour at Greifswald. It is evening, and between the masts of the two large ships in the middle ground stands the crescent of the waxing moon. Beneath it lie thin zones of colour, ranging from light yellow, orange and flaming red to lilac and grey on the horizon; above it, diagonal ribbons of cloud structure the sky. Within the almost unreal space thus created out of colour, the boats themselves are “floating” and seem to be moving forward out of the depths.

This view probably combines elements of Bohemia’s low-lying mountains with quotations from the coastal landscape of the island of R�gen.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: The Hebrides Overture (‘Fingals Cave’)

This painting seems fairly realistic at first sight. The composition is not the product of a single, specific visual impression, however, but is highly artificial, being composed of no less than six individual studies which Friedrich executed between 1806 and 1810. The landscape-format composition presents a plain extending without interruption into the background, seen as if the viewer were standing on the gentle rise which begins in the bottom left and right-hand corners. From here, our gaze falls upon a small pond - to which no path leads - and upon a huge oak tree, which looks at first sight to be fairly close by. Once our eyes have also registered the diminutive figure of a shepherd leaning against its trunk, however, the tree suddenly appears further away and hence gigantic. Aspects of proximity and distance are permanently chafing against each other throughout the painting, whereby rational everyday experience is thwarted by visual irrationality. While an idyll of unspoilt nature unfolds around the oak and the shepherd, the villages and church spires of the land developed by man are as it were concealed and compressed within a valley by the mountains and the sky high above. All this points to an overall symbolism in which the oak tree, monumentalized to the status of protagonist, is a metaphor for growth and decay or for human life in general.

The painting’s identically-sized pendant, the Moonrise by the Sea, is also in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Edvard Grieg: Peter Gynt Suite No 1, Op, 46 (‘Morning Mood’)

One of the leading artists of the German Romantic movement, born in the small Baltic seaport of Greifswald and trained at the Academy in Copenhagen, Friedrich specialised in landscape painting. His aim was not, as he wrote, ‘the faithful representation of air, water, rocks and trees…but the reflection of [the artist’s] soul and emotion in these objects’. Later, using landscape to convey subjective feelings, he also invested it with symbolism. Natural elements such as mountains, sea, trees, the seasons of the year and the times of day, often acquired religious significance.

Winter Landscape was originally exhibited by Friedrich in 1811 in Weimar with another winter scene, now in the museum in Schwerin. In the bleak Schwerin picture, a tiny figure on crutches stares out across a snow-covered plain. He is surrounded by the gnarled trunks of dead or dying oaks, and stumps of felled trees stretch away into the distance. But the uncompromising desolation of this image is countered by its companion now in London. Here the same cripple has abandoned his crutches. He leans against a sturdy rock, raising his hands in prayer before a crucifix gleaming against the vigorous evergreen branches of young fir trees. On the horizon the facade and spires of a Gothic church, whose silhouette echoes that of the firs, rise like a vision out of a bank of mist. Shoots of grass push through the snow, and the sky is streaked with the glow of dawn. The mortal despair in the first painting is here transformed into the hope of resurrection, the salvation vouchsafed through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Friedrich was not the only one of his countrymen in this period to draw an analogy between ‘native German’ Gothic church architecture and the natural growth of forest trees, and the imagery here almost certainly reflects his sympathies with the patriotic and democratic movements of the day as well as his religious faith.

Winter Landscape was painted with surprisingly few pigments, suggesting that Friedrich was less interested in colour than in smoothly graduated tones. He achieved the striking effect of shimmering, transparent haze by careful stippling with the point of the brush, using a blue pigment - smalt - which is transparent in an oil medium.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 37 minutes):

Schubert: Songs, transcripted for piano by Franz Liszt

The Winter Landscape in Schwerin has its counterpart in a Winter Landscape with Church in Dortmund. The Schwerin painting is characterized by the sombreness of an expanse of snow stretching away into the infinite distance, which modern interpreters see as a symbol of death, a nihilistic sign of doom. The pendant in Dortmund introduces, for the first time in Friedrich’s oeuvre, a Gothic church, seen as a monumental vision emerging out of the mist like a phantasmagoria and rising against the gloomy background of a winter sky. Nearer the viewer, a man is leaning back against a boulder and gazing up the crucifix in front of a cluster of young fir trees. He has flung his crutches demonstratively far away from him into the snow. This combination of motifs has been interpreted as a reference to the security of the Christian in his faith.

In the decades before and around 1848 the world, and especially the artists of the time, looked from the north to musical Vienna, and listened to the music of the classical Viennese period. The crow on a dead branch, or the painting of the lonely wanderer between bare trees in Friedrich’s Winter Landscape, was set to music by Schubert in his Winterreise.

Listen to a MIDI version of The Crow, song No. 15 in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey).

In a letter of 22 June 1811, written by Friederike Volkmann in Dresden to the psychologist Dr Christian August Heinroth in Leipzig, this painting is described as the pendant to the Winter Landscape now in Schwerin.

The Schwerin painting is characterized by the sombreness of an expanse of snow stretching away into the infinite distance, which modern interpreters see as a symbol of death, a nihilistic sign of doom. The pendant in Dortmund introduces, for the first time in Friedrich’s oeuvre, a Gothic church, seen as a monumental vision emerging out of the mist like a phantasmagoria and rising against the gloomy background of a winter sky. Nearer the viewer, a man is leaning back against a boulder and gazing up the crucifix in front of a cluster of young fir trees. He has flung his crutches demonstratively far away from him into the snow. This combination of motifs has been interpreted as a reference to the security of the Christian in his faith.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Vivaldi: Concerto in F minor RV 297 op. 8 No. 4 (Winter)

The artist’s creative intercession is manifest in Friedrich’s pictures in figures who stand with their backs to the viewer, looking into the subject. They are emblems of the artist himself, whose interpretation makes the world comprehensible to his audience. In his 1822 picture of his later studio in Dresden, the woman who looks through an open shutter at a glimpse of sunlit poplars and masts on the river is his wife Caroline.

In 1818, at the age of 44, Friedrich married Caroline Brommer, a cheerful 25 years old Saxon woman. That Caroline was a positive influence on the artist, which is evidenced by the fact that, from this point on, women appear with greater frequency in his work. A new, friendly element seems to enter his pictures. A case in point is the painting to which some authors give the title Woman before the Rising Sun, and which others call Woman before the Setting Sun. The woman seen in rear view appears as a large silhouette against the intense reddish-yellow of the sky. It is difficult to interpret the fervent gesture of her outstretched arms and the stylised rays radiating from the mountains on the hazy horizon, heralding the presence of the invisible sun.

Caroline was probably the model for the female figure in old-German dress. Since she is stepping towards the light like an early Christian in prayer, some have sought to interpret the painting in terms of a communion with nature. On the other hand, the atmosphere evoked in Friedrich’s painting might be interpreted as that of dusk, the path which terminates so abruptly as an announcement of death, and the boulders scattered alongside the path as symbols of faith. In the final analysis, few of Friedrich’s pictures are as emphatic and almost exaggeratedly symbolic in their effect - factors which render the painting not unproblematic for the viewer.

Friedrich’s last oil paintings such as the Wreck in the Moonlight and The Riesengebirge (both in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin), executed c. 1835 before he suffered a stroke on 26 June 1835 that left him partially paralysed in the arms and legs, around 1835, condense motifs typical of Friedrich into definitive statements which etch themselves indelibly upon the memory with their inner grandeur, their solemnity and their formal sovereignty.

The attribution of this painting to Friedrich is not undisputed. It is possible that the picture stems from the hand of a student friend in Copenhagen and that Friedrich gave it to relatives in Neubrandenburg, in whose possession it is later recorded.

Precisely when Friedrich first experimented in oils remains the subject of dispute. Even if we attribute to him the Wreck in the Sea of Ice this must remain an isolated tentative attempt, since sepia drawings subsequently continue to dominate his output.