Landscape Artist

Caspar David Friedrich.

A landscape painter of the nineteenth-century German Romantic movement, of which he is now considered the most important painter. A painter and draughtsman, Friedrich is best known for his later allegorical landscapes, which feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees, and Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey the spiritual experiences of life.

Friedrich's first major painting came at the age of 34. The Cross in the Mountains, now known as the The Tetschen Altar (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), was an altarpiece panel exhibited in 1808. The work met with controversy, but it was his first painting to gain wide appraisal; for the first time in Christian art, a pure landscape was the panel of an altarpiece. It depicts the crucified Christ in profile at the top of a mountain, alone, surrounded by nature. The cross rises highest in the composition, but is viewed obliquely and at a distance. The mountain symbolises an immovable faith, while the fir trees represent hope. In his 1809 commentary on the painting, Friedrich compared the rays of the evening sun to the light of the Holy Father. That the sun is sinking suggests that the time when God reveals himself directly to man is past. Friedrich's extended interpretation of his own work was the first and last of its kind.

Friedrich was acquainted with Philipp Otto Runge, another leading German painter of the Romantic period, and gained the admiration of the poet Goethe. He was also a friend of Georg Friedrich Kersting, who painted him at work in his unadorned studio, and the Norwegian painter Johann Christian Dahl. Dahl was close to Friedrich during the artist's last years, and complained that to the art-buying public, Friedrich's pictures were only "curiosities".Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic ... They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented.

In June 1835, Friedrich suffered a stroke that caused some limb paralysis. He took a rest cure at Teplitz, but his ability to paint was greatly diminished. He worked only in watercolour and sepia, and symbols of death appeared heavily in his work, such as a sepia with an outsized owl perched on a grave in front of a full moon. By 1838, he was almost incapable of artistic work, lived in poverty, and was increasingly dependent on the charity of friends. His work was now considered anachronistic, and his death in May 1840 caused little stir in the artistic community.

HIS WORKS

The Wanderer above the Mists

A young man stands upon a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer. He is wrapped in a dark green overcoat, and grips a walking stick in his right hand. His hair caught in a wind, the wanderer gazes out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog. In the middle ground, several other ridges, perhaps not unlike the ones the wanderer himself stands upon, jut out from the mass.Through the wreaths of fog, forests of trees can be perceived atop these escarpments. In the far distance, faded mountains rise in the left, gently levelling off into lowland plains in the east. Beyond here, the pervading fog stretches out indefinitely, eventually commingling with the horizon and becoming indistinguishable from the cloud-filled sky.

The painting has been reused repeatedly, for instance to promote a Canadian musical. It was used as the cover of the board game Fantastiqa. A painting using the same man with his back turned, titled "Wanderer" appears within the computer game Minecraft. The title of the painting is the name of a song in Wolves in the Throne Room's 2009 album Black Cascade. From the 1960s on, Gotthard Graubner's "fog spaces", one of them entitled Erster Nebelraum - Hommage à Caspar David Friedrich (1968) were clearly inspired by Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. In 2008, the painting was used as inspiration for the promotional image of David Tennant as Hamlet at the RSC.The German tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, uses this painting on his Decca CD of Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Wagner arias. He is pictured face forward replacing the back view of the "Wanderer". The painting is also used on the cover of the Thus Spoke Zarathustra Barnes and Noble Classics edition and on the cover of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Dover Thrift Edition). It is used on the jacket cover of John Crowley's novel Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. The painting is also used on the cover of Acting on Principle Cambridge University Press on Kantian ethics.Canadian musician Ben Caplan references the painting on the cover of his album Birds With Broken Wings featuring a pastiche of Caplan as the wanderer from a different perspective.

I feel life is like this picture, standing in front of my doubts every day.That is art.I get the sense that he feels alone. Like the world is against him. He just wants answers.How many of us have felt like this wanderer, standing solitary on a rock, contemplating the fogginess and uncertainty of the immediate future, but seeing a glimmer of hope out in the clearer distance? This profoundly allegorical painting contains so much more than brush stroke technique. It invites us to gaze along with the wanderer and feel what he feels through the sheer beauty of nature.I plan on usin his works as reference maybe in future.