“Caspar David Friedrich…”, wrote sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, “created a new genre: the tragedy of landscape.”
Friedrich attempted to create Christian religious art without the traditional biblical scenes, instead using allegorical landscape to convey religious themes. In spite of its message of Christian redemption, his work is steeped in loneliness, isolation and desolation, perhaps because of tragedy in childhood. He witnessed his brother drowning in the Baltic after falling through thin ice while attempting to rescue him from the same fate, his mother died when he was 7 and two of his sisters died by the time he was 18.
His fascination with ruins of churches, graveyards, shipwrecks, isolated individuals among hauntingly portrayed landscapes and mist enshrouded planes populated by bare trees made him a favorite of the Surrealists, who saw him as a visionary painter.
Similarly, he had a great impact on Symbolist painters like Arnold Böcklin, whose own tragic life and fascination with death undoubtedly found resonance in Friedrich’s silent stones and “haunted, frightened trees” (to borrow a wonderfully appropriate line from Bob Dylan).
Friedrich started his career doing sepia ink and wash drawings of landscapes; he didn’t take up oil painting until he was 30. In the course of his career he became one of the masters of romantic landscape painting along with Turner and Constable. Toward the end of his life he was crippled by a stroke and, unable to paint in oil, he returned to sepia drawings.
Unfortunately, some of his work was lost, both to fire and to the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II. We have only photographic records, mostly in black and white, of some of his masterworks, although some have been colorized by modern artists in an attempt to reconstruct their original appearance.
WE LOVE THIS PIECE OF ART!!!
larah! i love your name!
Thanks! I hope you love this picture. I am using it in a language project. Im actually recreating it as we speak….
how come no one will comment back!!
could someone please tell me what the piece at the top is called. i have done a pastiche but don’t know the name of what i have drawn. :P
please get back to me on that
Tha piece is called Ruin at Eldena, you will also see it listed as Eldena Ruin or Ruine Eldena.
Thank you very much or putting this site together. This site has the best links I’ve ever seen for Caspar David Friedrich’s art. I’m finishing up a paper on this artist and your site has helped me so much. (I will definitely tell my professor and other Friedrich fans about your site.)
By the way, on one of the last links on the Artcyclopedia site, there is a link to a site called ARC – Art Renewal Center. Wow. They have a wonderful collection – just to let you know.
Bye for now and thanks again — Theresa.
Thanks, Theresa.
ARC was actually topic of my very first post on lines and colors back in 2005. It’s an amazing site, though I often find the colors in their images need a bit of correction.
hurricane
really good painting
Would love to establish a dialogue about this painting. I think its message is certainly spiritual, but not religious in the traditional sense, and definitely not christian. In fact, if anything it is antichristian. The ruins appear to be of a gothic cathederal, judging by the pointed arch. But the structure no longer appears to fulfill a formal religious use. It has been left by it’s onetime builders and users to decay. Nature appears to be in the process of filling the space once devoted to christian symbols and liturgies. Nature is the enduring, surviving force in this picture, together with the humble people in the farmhouse. Can someone help me further along with the meaning of this painting?