Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich made works that squarely presented the viewer with the awesome to evoke a sensation of the endless. Friedrich gave great religious and spiritual importance to the environment painting genre, originally believed to be unimportant. He used sunlit vistas and misty expanses to express the lovely power of the divine because he thought that the majesty of the natural world could only reflect the majesty of God.
Early life and education
Caspar David Friedrich was born into a deeply religious Lutheran family as the sixth of 10 children. He was introduced to sorrow at a young age since he lost his mother when he was seven and two of his siblings to illnesses they acquired as kids. The death of his brother Johann, who perished while striving to save the then-13-year-old artist after he plunged through the ice, was possibly the most tragic loss.
His early passion for the arts was fostered, and when he was twenty, he entered the Copenhagen Academy. He acquired a lifelong passion for the outdoors and nature in addition to learning from the masters. Significantly, he also immersed himself in mystical and metaphysical poetry that would inspire his later work and establish the foundation for his position as one of the founders of German Romanticism.
Career
The artist traveled to Dresden after completing his education in 1798, where his work was well received. Friedrich accepted Romantic concepts, such as the spiritual possibilities of art and the expression of religious impulses through the power of nature, from these very first pictures. As stated by the artist, "The divine, the limitless, is what man should strive for above all else. He should strive for the art, not for the artist! Art is endless, finite all artists' abilities and knowledge. The Cross in the Mountains (1807–08) and Morning Mist in the Mountains show how Friedrich began to use the landscape as his popular means for depicting the sublime (1808).
Friedrich's interest in the landscape throughout these years of the Napoleonic Empire had political importance since he painted typical German locales with a sense of pride and strength that was nearly unmatched in the globe. Many of Friedrich's colleagues saw his works through this prism of political autonomy and cultural legacy up to Napoleon's downfall in 1815. They thought they offered the promise of future freedom from foreign dominion.
Mature Period
After being accepted to the Dresden Academy in 1816, Friedrich quickly established himself as one of the leaders of the German Romanticism movement and received a consistent income. The marriage had an immediate influence on his career, despite his image as a reclusive person who once said, "in order not to dislike people, I should escape their presence." He started including his wife in several of his paintings, changing his well-known pattern of a lone figure lost in the countryside to occasionally include a pair.
Frederick drew the attention and support of significant global personalities. The Monk by the Sea (1808–10) and Abbey in an Oak Forest (1809–10) are two works Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig of Prussia purchased thanks to the acclaim he gained when they were shown at the Berlin Academy. The artist would remain to get assistance from the reigning family until his political liberalization led him to lose their favor. Tsar Nicholas, I bought some of his paintings for his court in Russia, illustrating how highly accepted his art was there. Prince Nicholas of Russia commissioned the artist in 1830 to create a series of translucent paintings that were now gone and supposed to be presented with music and a room's blackness lighted from behind.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose works symbolize the literary iteration of the trend, was a kindred spirit to Friedrich's Romantic sensibilities (Goethe was much older than Friedrich and already a star by the time they met). They divided up in 1816, but Goethe's systematic work with color theory points to a more realistic and logical attitude to the visual arts. Friedrich protested, arguing that such studies would not adhere to the Romantic notions of the holiness of nature and would only be a scientific practice. Goethe proposed that Friedrich painted clouds to record their varied varieties.
Later Period
In later life, Friedrich suffered losses similar to those he had in his youth. After his friend and fellow artist Gerhard von Kügelgen was killed in 1820, he sank into utter despair and turned to education for consolation and pleasure. A rising interest in Realism and Naturalism in German painting during this decade hurt Friedrich's reputation, and his commitment to Romantic landscapes went out of style. Due to this, in 1824, he was passed over for the chair of landscape painting at the Dresden Academy. Soon after, he became unwell and could not paint in oil until 1826.
The already isolated individuals had grown even further alienated from society by 1830. He became much more depressed and skeptical of his friends and wife, whom he wrongly assumed were having an affair. Some historians have interpreted his latter works as somber thoughts on mortality and the passage of time since he wanted to entertain only his closest friends and family and dwell in the quiet of his studio. Even yet, his latter years were prolific, making substantial works like The Stages of Life (1835).
After a stroke on June 26, 1835, Friedrich could only draw sketches and was left largely immobile. Before passing away in May 1840, he had a second stroke and fell into poverty.
Achievements
In contrast to more direct interaction with the environment, Friedrich's somber landscapes, which frequently plunge the spectator into the wilds of the environment, elicit an emotional response from the viewer. He earned worldwide attention because he integrated spiritual value with landscape painting.
Although Friedrich's allegorical and theological landscapes were criticized by his conservative contemporaries, the artist insisted that his work never merely copied a view but instead offered the chance to reflect on God's presence in the universe. Friedrich urged the spectator to embrace the immense force of nature as proof of a heavenly spirit by using spectacular perspectives and foggy, untamed landscapes that dwarfed any people.
The artist masterfully portrayed mist, fog, darkness, and light to represent the natural world's limitless energy and ageless essence while concurrently reminding the observer of his own fragility and insignificance.
Friedrich's use of subdued color and concentration on light commonly generated an overpowering sensation of emptiness that would impact Modern Art. His audiences were frequently bewildered by the odd visual simplicity of his paintings; according to one account, one group of art lovers who visited his workshop saw a piece upside down on the easel and mistook the clouds for waves and the ocean for the sky.
Art by Caspar David Friedrich
The Cross in the Mountains (The Tetschen Altar) 1807-08
Morning Mist in the Mountains 1808
The Monk by the Sea 1808-10
Wanderer above a Sea of Fog 1818
The Abbey in the Oak Wood 1808-10
On the Sailing Boat 1819
Morning 1820-21
The Sea of Ice 1823-24
The Stages of Life1835
