Caspar David Friedrich facts for kids

Gerhard von Kügelgen, Portrait of Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1810–20)

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important of the movement.

He is best known for landscapes, which typically feature lonely figures against night skies, morning mists or Gothic ruins.

Images for kids

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  Caspar David Friedrich by Christian Gottlieb Kuhn 1807, Albertinum, Dresden

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  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). 94.8 × 74.8 cm, Kunsthalle Hamburg. This well-known and especially Romantic masterpiece was described by the historian John Lewis Gaddis as leaving a contradictory impression, "suggesting at once mastery over a landscape and the insignificance of the individual within it. We see no face, so it's impossible to know whether the prospect facing the young man is exhilarating, or terrifying, or both."

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  Self-portrait (1800) is a chalk drawing of the artist at 26, completed while he was studying at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen

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  Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altar) (1808). 115 × 110.5 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden. Friedrich's first major work, the piece breaks with the traditional representation of crucifixion in altarpieces by depicting the scene as a landscape.

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  Rocky Landscape in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains (between 1822 and 1823)

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  Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818). 90.5 × 71 cm. Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten, Winterthur, Switzerland. Friedrich married Christiane Caroline Bommer in 1818, and on their honeymoon they visited relatives in Neubrandenburg and Greifswald. This painting celebrates the couple's union.

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  Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio (1819), Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Kersting portrays an aged Friedrich holding a maulstick at his canvas.

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  Grave of Caspar David Friedrich, Trinitatis-Friedhof, Dresden

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  Friedrich: Cemetery Entrance. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden

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  The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808–1810). 110.4 × 171 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Albert Boime writes, "Like a scene from a horror movie, it brings to bear on the subject all the Gothic clichés of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries".

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  The Sea of Ice (1823–24), Kunsthalle Hamburg. This scene has been described as "a stunning composition of near and distant forms in an Arctic image".

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  Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (c. 1824). 34 × 44 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. A couple gaze longingly at nature. Dressed in "Old German" clothes, according to Robert Hughes they are "scarcely different in tone or modelling from the deep dramas of nature around them".

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  Caspar David Friedrich, oil on canvas, by Carl Johann Baehr, 1836, New Masters Gallery, Dresden

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  Edvard Munch, The Lonely Ones (1899). Woodcut. Munch Museum, Oslo

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  Paul Nash, Totes Meer (Sea of the Dead), 1940–41. 101.6 x 152.4 cm. Tate Gallery. Nash's work depicts a graveyard of crashed German planes comparable to The Sea of Ice (above). Nash described the image as a sea, even suggesting that the jagged forms were not metal but ice.

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  Ivan Shishkin, In the Wild North (1891). 161 x 118 cm. Kiev Museum of Russian Art

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  Old Heroes' Graves, (1812), 49.5 × 70.5 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg. A dilapidated monument inscribed "Arminius" invokes the Germanic chieftain, a symbol of nationalism, while the four tombs of fallen heroes are slightly ajar, freeing their spirits for eternity. Two French soldiers appear as small figures before a cave, lower and deep in a grotto surrounded by rock, as if farther from heaven.

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  The Cross Beside The Baltic (1815), 45 × 33.5 cm. Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. This painting marked a move away by Friedrich from depictions in broad daylight, and a return to nocturnal scenes, twilight and a deeper poignancy of mood.

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  Moonrise over the Sea (1822). 55 × 71 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. During the early 1820s, human figures appear with increasing frequency in his paintings. Of this period, Linda Siegel writes, "the importance of human life, particularly his family, now occupies his thoughts more and more, and his friends appear as frequent subjects in his art."

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  Graveyard under Snow (1826). 31 × 25 cm. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig. Friedrich sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and the afterlife. He also created some of the funerary art in Dresden's cemeteries.

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  The Oak Tree in the Snow (1829). 71 × 48 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Friedrich was one of the first artists to portray winter landscapes as stark and dead. His winter scenes are solemn and still—according to the art historian Hermann Beenken, Friedrich painted winter scenes in which "no man has yet set his foot".

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  The Stages of Life (Die Lebensstufen (1835). Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig. The Stages of Life is a meditation on the artist's own mortality, depicting five ships at various distances from the shore. The foreground similarly shows five figures at different stages of life.

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  The Giant Mountains (1830–1835). 72 × 102 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Friedrich sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature.

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  Seashore by Moonlight (1835–36). 134 × 169 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg. His final "black painting", Seashore by Moonlight, is described by William Vaughan as the "darkest of all his shorelines."