The epitome of German Romanticism: Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was 65 when he died in Dresden on May 7, 1840. He came from a tallow boiler family in Greifswald; at that time the city by the sea belonged to Swedish Pomerania. He learned his trade at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen, but the artistic impulse for his own style was gleaned at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. There, he tried out new painting techniques.

He achieved his first success as a painter in 1805 with the Weimar Art Prize. Poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is said to have had a decisive influence on the award decision; the young painter had caught his attention with his wildly romantic landscape painting. At the time, Friedrich was still painting in sepia; from 1807 onwards, he painted his first oil paintings, here: "Landscape with Rainbow."

From 1806 onward, Caspar David Friedrich traveled widely in Germany — from Rügen, where he repeatedly immortalized the chalk cliffs (see above) in his paintings, to the Harz Mountains and the Ore Mountains. He relished in rough, untouched nature. He made detailed sketches of rocks, trees and clouds. A euphoric review by Heinrich von Kleist made his paintings known to a wider audience.

Friedrich was particularly interested in the lighting conditions at different times of day. The color shades of the landscape changed constantly. "Waft of Mist" was the object of a spectacular art heist in the 20th century: Thieves stole it from the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 1994. Scotland Yard detectives managed to retrieve and return it to the donating institution, the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

The nature motifs of Caspar David Friedrich were often images of longing, with a touch of sadness. The young painter was said to have a penchant for "intense melancholy." The death of his sister Dorothea in 1808 and his father in 1809 threw him off track. Fortunately, an attempt at suicide failed, but his inner loss remained a motif in his later paintings throughout his life.

One of his most famous paintings, the "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" is considered an autobiographical image. Caspar David Friedrich also painted himself in such romantic poses — as a man fascinated by the supernatural beauty of nature — in other pictures. Some of them had almost religious elements.

The artist seemed rather unworldly in his painting. Yet as a supporter of a national liberation movement, he was politically involved. In debates, he displayed a fanatical hatred of France. After Napoleon's victory, his rather spartan studio became a hub for patriotic men. The upheavals of this time were reflected in pictures like "The Sea of Ice."

A sense of indeterminate homesickness shaped the motifs of his paintings. In 1924, he became a professor in Dresden. And despite being married — a relationship to which he took a rather matter-of-fact stance — and having a family, he could not escape his feeling of loneliness, which he revealed to friends. Political disappointment, spying and scheming at the academy increasingly embittered him.

To this day, Caspar David Friedrich's atmospheric paintings have inspired countless artists. The German painter Gerhard Richter also revived Friedrich's singular atmosphere of light over the ice-gray sea in his famous "Seascape." In 2019, "Seascape (green-grey, cloudy)" from 1969 was exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Richter has taken up this wildly romantic motif several times.

The painter himself was also a motif for some of his fellow artists; here is a portrait by Gerhard von Kügelgen, created between 1810 and 1820. As one of the great Romantics, Friedrich also departed from the charming landscape painting of his contemporaries, setting sparse accents in his nearly empty oil paintings. With his radical image design, he was one of the modern artists of his time.