Casper David Friedrich
Born – Greifswalk, Germany 1774
Died – Dresden, Germany 1840
Caspar David Friedrich was a Romantic landscape painter who spent most of his life in Dresden. He trained at the Academy in Copenhagen, where he began to produce paintings that demonstrated his particular interest in light and the changing seasons. His landscapes were not, as he himself remarked, “the faithful representation of air, water, rocks and trees…but the reflection of the soul and emotion in these objects.” In using landscape as a vehicle to convey deep, emotional feelings, there are parallels between Friedrich and his fellow countryman, Altdorfer, painting some three hundred years earlier. For Friedrich, nature was of religious and often symbolic significance. In The Stages of Life the sweeping perspective from the figure in the foreground right out to the ships on the horizon, not only suggests distance but the passage of time. The golden sunset imbues this melancholic scene with a sense of nostalgia. The empty, arctic wasteland depicted in another important symbolic work, Wreck of the Hope, conveys a profound sense of despair and desolation. In his attention to detail, Friedrich foreshadowed the work of pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the late 1840s.
Masterpieces:
- Winter Landscape
- The Wreck of Hope
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.