Caspar David Friedrich is classed as the epitome of the Romantic: No one captured longing, sensibility, and mystical mortal agony so formidably in pictures like this artist. And yet, as one of the best-known German painters, he was actually a rebellious revolutionary who radically broke with outdated traditions and ultimately even paved the way for modern art.
(...) Continue readingCaspar David Friedrich – The brother’s death as burden for the artist’s life
Caspar David Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774 in Greifswald. He was the sixth of ten children of a candlemaker and businessman, and following the premature death of his mother, the elder sister Dorothea took on her role, softening the puritanical strictness of his father. Except for a few calligraphic exercises of Christian texts, nothing is known about Friedrich’s early school years, but from 1790, he received a few hours of drawing lessons each week from the university master Johann Gottfried Quistorp. The drowning of Friedrich’s younger brother Johann Christoffer whilst playing together was a traumatic experience for Caspar David, and proved the root of the psychological problems that tormented the artist his whole life, casting dark shadows over his family life.
Studies at the liberal Copenhagen Academy
In contrast to the petit-bourgeois confines of his parent’s home, in 1794 Caspar David Friedrich began studying at the Copenhagen Art Academy - considered particularly liberal – where his teachers included Johannes Wiedewelt, Jens Juel, Nicolai Abildgaard and Erik Pauelsen. Although the field of painting was not taught in its own right, Friedrich profited from the comprehensive painting collection in which the Dutch masters were strongly represented. In later years, the artist distanced himself from his teachers and insisted that not everything could be learnt though ‘dead practice’. During his student years, Friedrich cultivated a large circle of friends and kept contact with at least the painter Johan Ludwig Gerhard Lund beyond his studies.
Artistic successes in Dresden; protest against Napoleon
In 1798, Caspar David Friedrich returned to Germany and settled in Dresden, where he found great inspiration in the landscape outside of the city gates in particular, working his way through psychological crises to achieve his first artistic successes. It was Goethe himself who ultimately decreed he be awarded the first prize of the Weimar Friends of Art, although Friedrich’s submissions had not even fulfilled the set requirements. The artist was deeply affected by the deaths of his sister Dorothea and his father, and he visualised these blows in the gloomy paintings Abbey in the Oakwood and The Monk by the Sea. During the Napoleonic campaigns, Friedrich protested intensely against France, with his house becoming a meeting place for the ardent patriots amongst the German artists such as Heinrich von Kleist, Theodor Körner and Ernst Moritz Arndt.
Fragile marital bliss and overshadowed twilight years
Caspar David Friedrich’s income as a member of the Dresden Academy encouraged him to start a family at the age of 42. The marriage was happy at the beginning but became increasingly burdened by the artist’s psychological and economic difficulties. The powerholders had lost all interest in his patriotic paintings after Napoleon’s fall, and his penchant for mysticism seemed no longer in keeping with the times. Marked by health problems, the artist had to witness how he became increasingly forgotten. His friend and patron, the Russian poet Wassili A. Schukow noted in his diary that he had found the artist a weeping ruin. A short while later, Caspar David Friedrich died in Dresden on 7 May 1840 at the age of 65. Posterity has long rediscovered the forgotten artist and he is celebrated as one of the great Romantic masters, with high prices paid for Friedrich’s works today.
Caspar David Friedrich - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
