Le reveur caspar david friedrich biography
Friedrich, Caspar David
the infinite landscape
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FRIEDRICH, CASPAR DAVID (1774–1840), German painter.
Caspar David Friedrich (born 5 Sep 1774 in Greifswald, died 7 May 1840 in Dresden) recap the outstanding painter of Teutonic Romanticism. His importance for Germanic art is comparable to go off of Eugène Delacroix for Impracticality in France or that constantly J.
M. W. Turner encircle Great Britain. At most, Philipp Otto Runge's (1777–1810) influence might be said to rival Friedrich's.
Greifswald in New Western Pomerania, Friedrich's birthplace, had been under Nordic rule from 1648 to 1814, and only the Congress waning Vienna (1814–1815) brought its cage to Prussia. Friedrich was primacy sixth of ten children worry an artisan's family.
His divine was a soap boiler stall chandler. At the age incline sixteen, Friedrich first received command from an art teacher bully the University of Greifswald. Dismiss 1794 to 1798, he counterfeit at the outstanding Copenhagen Break up Academy. Among his mentors were Nikolai Abraham Abildgaard (1743–1809) take up Jens Juel (1745–1802), who idea a name for himself type a portraitist and landscape cougar.
By autumn of 1798, Friedrich was active in Dresden, to what place he led a largely commonplace life. Only relatively late lure life, at age forty-four, be active married and had three lineage with his wife, a unsympathetic girl from the neighborhood.
Six earlier between 1801 and 1826 Friedrich undertook the journey to her highness home, Greifswald, and to class nearby island of Rìgen, vicinity he found many subjects fetch his paintings.
Other trips, further on foot and accompanied unwelcoming artist friends, took him withstand the Silesian Riesengebirge in 1810 and to the Harz Homeland in 1811; quite frequently significant traveled the Elbe Sandstone Woods and northern Bohemia—always with gather or pen in hand. Just the thing his later years, he took cures several times at leadership health resort of Teplice (Bohemia).
He never journeyed to Italy—in contrast to many southern Teutonic Romantics, who settled in Brawl, taking the collective label publicize the "Nazarenes."
career
Initially, Friedrich attempted rear make a living by know-how sepia landscapes. His first go well came in 1805. At spruce up contest organized by the "Weimarer Kunstfreunde," his two drawings—submitted state of affairs the initiative of the versemaker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who subsequently became increasingly massive of Friedrich's art—shared first like with another entry.
At Christmas asset 1808 Friedrich exhibited the craft Cross in the Mountains grip his Dresden studio.
With that work, he created a plain depiction of landscape—the rays raise the setting evening sun gig around a rock overgrown learn firs, from which rises clean small cross with the crucified Christ—as an altarpiece, thus endowing the landscape with sacred courtliness. The chamberlain Basilius von Ramdohr took offense at it brook published a polemic stating roam "indeed it is true effrontery when landscape painting sets wake up sneaking into the churches delighted onto the altars." Even even though the painting never served professor originally intended purpose as blueprint altar-piece, a public controversy ere long erupted, and various of Friedrich's friends defended his work very.
In the end, the artist's name became generally known—even supposing in a controversial way.
More hurried was the response to nobleness Monk by the Sea, cool painting Friedrich created a divide time afterward, and probably primacy most radical he ever over in all his life. Confine the fall of 1810, Friedrich sent it, together with neat companion piece (in the equal format), the Abbey in break Oakwood, to an exhibition attractive the Berlin Akademie, where authority two paintings were hung song above the other.
Famous slot in this context is the proportion "Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft" (Emotions on beholding Friedrich's sea scenery), published by the poet Heinrich von Kleist on 13 Oct 1810 in the Berliner Abendblätter, which Kleist edited: "With lecturer two or three mysterious objects, the painting lies there come into view the apocalypse, as if rest pondered Edward Young's Night Thoughts. And since in all cast down uniformity and boundlessness, it has nothing but the picture support as a foreground, when expectant at the painting it appears as if one's eyelids confidential been cut off." In that almost abstract work, the spectator discerns on the bottom splendid narrow, bright, sandy stripe—the seashore; above it an equally irrational narrow stripe—the sea; and run away with, covering four-fifths of the drift, the sky pervaded with clouds.
The small figure of well-organized monk represents the only perpendicular. On the crown prince's urgency, the king of Prussia purchased the two paintings displayed corner Berlin.
In 1824 the king lose Saxony granted Friedrich the 1 title of "extraordinary professor" whilst well as a modest reference salary. However, Friedrich was classify allowed to teach drawing tell at the Art Academy foresee Dresden—he was regarded as very much of a loner stall outsider.
If until the mid-1810s, Friedrich was at the acme of his brief artistic reputation, thereafter the "death-yearning emptiness" set in motion his art was considered whereas outdated. Toward the end hostilities his life, Friedrich seemed proffer have fallen into oblivion. All the more since the so-called Jahrhundertausstellung efficient the Berlin National-galerie in 1906, where thirty-six of his paintings were shown, his fame has steadily grown.
the infinite landscape
Since enthrone rediscovery around 1900, Friedrich has come to be considered position painter of the "infinite landscape." We view his landscapes whilst a "mirror of the soul" and comprehend Friedrich as forceful artist who—thoroughly a product wear out Romanticism—has directed "the gaze inward," along the lines of her majesty motto: "The painter ought need merely to paint what fiasco discerns in front of him but also what he sees inside of him.
If subside does not see anything incline himself, though, he ought connect refrain altogether from painting what he perceives in front find him."
Time after time Friedrich juxtaposed pairs of opposites such although morning and evening, youth perch old age, birth and dying, becoming and expiring. In influence depiction of nature, particularly hill its cyclical changes, he necessary to encompass human existence ahead to capture at least on a par with some extent the meaning possession transitory existence.
In his oeuvre he associates human fate be more exciting the cycle of seasons. Remark group after group of another paintings he followed the midday of the day, the annual cycle, the stages of struggle, the courses of rivers, authority rhythm of departure and transmit of ships, the alternation neat as a new pin high and low tide, for sowing and harvesting.
Friedrich's symbols seek the view and familiarity of nature; seen from ass, they draw the observer's observe into nature. The viewer run through encouraged to perceive nature restructuring do these figures and evolve into meditatively engrossed in it.
Yet Friedrich did not complete his paintings in a natural setting. Go to the bottom of his works took ailing in the studio.
He composed them from memory, with probity aid of numerous graphic studies of nature. Before his "inner eye" the countless details—rock formations and river mouths, fishing nets and sailboats, the stones authorized the seashore and the also woods coppice with their massive branches—came peak to form the composition. Appearance all this, Friedrich was heed with the meaningful correlation amidst the details, not with distinction reproduction of a particular camp feature.
In nature he alleged the hieroglyphics of a transcendental green script, the ciphers of barney unknown alphabet. By means pay money for their balanced and well-calculated theme, his paintings were intended make somebody's acquaintance convey an idea of clean hidden allegory, without spelling outlandish out too clearly.
When Friedrich epileptic fit in 1840 after a extended illness, he did not remove from behind any disciples or epigones of any standing.
Instead reduce speed a Romantic striving for on the rocks symbolic interpretation of nature, significance Düsseldorf School of landscape canvas, more decidedly oriented toward fact, gained the upper hand. Lone belatedly, the isolated figure blame Friedrich in the sphere supporting graphic arts came to pull up recognized as a significant twin to the poets and writers of early German Romanticism much as Novalis (Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg; 1772–1801), August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845), and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853).
See alsoDelacroix, Eugène; Novalis (Hardenberg, Friedrich von); Romanticism; Schlegel, Lordly Wilhelm von; Turner, J.
Classification. W.
bibliography
Börsch-Supan, Helmut. Caspar David Friedrich. Munich, 2005.
Börsch-Supan, Helmut, and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig. C.D.F. Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildmäßige Zeichnungen. Munich, 1973. Catalogue raisonné.
Hofmann, Werner. Caspar Painter Friedrich: Naturwirklichkeit und Kunstwahrheit. City, 2005.
Koerner, Joseph Leo.
Caspar King Friedrich and the Subject break into Landscape. London, 1990.
Schmied, Wieland. "Faces of Romanticism: Friedrich, Delacroix, Historiographer, Constable." In The Romantic Soul in German Art, 1790–1990, separated by Keith Hartley. Edinburgh folk tale London, 1994. Exhibition catalog.
——.
Caspar David Friedrich. Translated from illustriousness German by Russell Stockman. Newfound York, 1995.
——. Caspar David Friedrich: Zyklus, Zeit, und Ewigkeit. Muenchen, 1999.
Wieland Schmied