Germany's Forgotten Romantic Hero

Hamburger Kunsthalle
The Sea of Ice by Caspar David Friedrich, 1823-24

By Roderick Conway Morris

BERLIN 7 June 2024

'People stand before Friedrich with wide-open eyes,' wrote Hamburg's art gallery director Alfred Lichtwark, describing the reaction of the visitors to the works of Caspar David Friedrich at the landmark German Centenary Exhibition at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1906.

Even the principal curator of the exhibition, Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Nationalgalerie, waxed lyrical in the show's catalogue when he evoked the distinctive elements in Friedrich's landscapes: 'the brown field, above which the setting sun glows, the lonely plain that becomes lost in the blue twilight of distant mountains, damp meadows across which the shadows of clouds wander, the gently rolling hilly landscape, above which the silvery fragrance of a pale spring day is suspended, the flat waves of the Bohemian mountains, between which the morning fog seethes.'

For Friedrich's nearly one hundred works to stand out in the enormous 1906 exhibition of over 2,000 paintings, 1,300 drawings, watercolours and miniatures and 70 sculptures, was partly due to the fact that the artist, who lived between 1774 and 1840, had sunk into total obscurity in the intervening years and his rediscovery was a revelation to both the art establishment and the public alike.

This year is the 250th anniversary of Friedrich's birth and is being marked by an exhilarating exhibition, 'Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes', at Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie (as it is now called) and a splendid, beautifully illustrated book of the same title, edited by the show's curator Birgit Verwiebe and Ralph Gleis.

Casper David Friedrich was born in Greifswald, an ancient Hanseatic city on the Baltic coast of Pomerania in north-eastern Germany, with a thriving port at the mouth of the river Ryck, then surrounded (as some of the artist's paintings record) by fertile meadowlands. He received his early training in drawing and etching there before going on in 1794 to the Art Academy in Copenhagen. In 1798, after a short sojourn in Berlin, he enrolled at the Hochschule der Bildenen Künste in Dresden, the city where he was to spend the rest of his life.

Friedrich's early career was devoted to the graphic arts. Dresden had a tradition of encouraging the study of landscape, including details such as bridges, rivers, trees, hills and views of cities. The artist returned to his hometown Greifswald between 1801 and 1802, and made sketches to create large brush-and-sepia ink landscapes (a Dresden speciality), which were praised by Goethe, exhibited in Weimar and won a prize. He also visited the nearby island of Rügen, to which he was to return on his honeymoon with his wife Caroline Bommer in 1818. This trip also produced such notable works as 'Woman on the Beach of Rügen' and his spectacular 'Chalk Cliffs of Rügen'. Caroline also figures in one of his now most famous pictures, 'Woman at a Window' (1822). Like almost all the artist's figures she is depicted from behind, as she does again alongside Friedrich in 'Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon' (c. 1824).

Turner and Friedrich were almost exact contemporaries and both were highly original but in different ways. Turner did not begin to paint in oils until he had turned thirty, Friedrich even later at around thirty-three. The German artist's first venture into this new medium was possibly the result of a commission for an altarpiece. He was a devout Lutheran Protestant but espoused modern ideas, which included regarding nature and man as the ultimate expressions of the Divine. In 1807 he transformed his sepia drawing 'The Cross in the Mountains' (1805-7) into an oil altarpiece for the Protestant chapel in Tetchen in Bohemia. He also designed the carved palm-leaf and cherub gilded frame.

All Friedrich's subsequent oils are replete with religious symbolism although, as time went on, explicit emblems, such as crucifixes and Gothic ruins, were increasingly replaced by simply majestic views of nature in which, as the art historian Franz Dülberg put it, 'vast chains of hills and mountains, vast stretches of seas' expressed 'the endlessness and goodness of the universe'.

Between 1809 and 1810, Friedrich was working on a pair of pictures, 'Monk by the Sea' and 'Abbey in the Oakwood'. The latter shows a funeral procession of cowled monks amid, in Friedrich's own words, 'snow-covered tombstones and burial mounds and the remains of a Gothic church, surrounded by ancient oaks. The sun has set and in the twilight, the evening star and the crescent moon hover brightly above the ruins.' He did a number of such pendants, but their relationships can remain elusive. Of this pair, he wrote they encapsulated 'that which can be seen and recognized only through faith, and which will remain eternally a riddle to the finite knowledge of humans. In a sense, what I wish to depict, and the way I seek to do so, remains a riddle even to me.'

When the two pictures were displayed at the Berlin Art Academy as 'Two Landscapes in Oil', they received sharp criticism from some quarters but were admired by German Romantics. The Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Willem III, who was known for his Romantic sympathies, persuaded his father the King to buy the pictures. The Prince's sister Charlotte of Prussia, also an admirer of the artist, later became Tsarina in Russia and brought further canvases to St. Petersburg, which encouraged purchases by other collectors there.

Recent analysis of Friedrich's pictures has highlighted the artist's techniques in producing these sublime works. In many ways, he remained a graphic artist to the end. All his canvases are characterized by meticulous underdrawing over the whole area of the picture, which can be revealed by such techniques as infrared reflectography. He then applied very thin layers of oil paint, which sometimes leave some underdrawing still visible. But in the case of 'The Monk by the Sea', three carefully drawn ships, their rigging and sails have been entirely painted over and obscured by a bank of fog worthy of the mature Turner. Curiously enough the 'Monk' is taken from a drawing included in a manual used at the Copenhagen Academy, based on the figure of St Paul in a Raphael Altarpiece.

Friedrich never painted his landscapes en plein air. He did countless drawings in situ in the countryside around Dresden and made regular expeditions on foot through the Harz, Giant and Bohemian Mountains. While he sometimes made colour notes on drawings, the fact that he managed to transform these monochrome materials into canvases with such astonishing chromatic nuances suggests he was gifted with a phenomenal visual memory and hypersensitivity to colour variations and gradations. The rare images of him in his Dresden studio, by Georg Friedrich Kersting, show the walls entirely bare but for a couple of couple of spare pallets and no reference drawings whatsoever.

To escape the Napoleonic occupation of Dresden in 1813, the artist took refuge in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains in south-eastern Saxony on the border of northern Bohemia. When he returned the following year, he contributed to an exhibition celebrating Dresden's liberation. As a protest against the French during this period, patriots adopted Altdeutsche Tracht, or Old German dress, which included large velvet berets and other elements of traditional costume. Such antique headgear and old-style cloaks began to appear in Friedrich's paintings at this time. It remained popular with intellectuals, artists and students, to demonstrate their Republican sympathies, but with the reassertion of monarchical powers it was banned in 1819. Though old-fashioned dress continued to appear in Friedrich's canvases, the solitary, bare-headed figure gazing over a landscape inspired by the unusual rock formations of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, 'The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' (c.1817), wears a contemporary frock coat.

Despite his detailed graphic studies of nature, when it came to his compositions in oil, imagination played a large part in achieving the effects he strove to create. In 1823-24 he painted two pictures: 'Rocky Reef by the Seashore' and 'The Sea of Ice'. The former may well have been based on a dramatic rock formation he had actually seen, but in the latter he transformed it, in one of his most dramatic imagined images, into massive, heaving slabs of arctic ice pushing skywards amid which a hapless vessel has foundered, the stern of which can be glimpsed just before it disappears.

The Norwegian landscape painter Johann Christian Dahl moved into a flat in Friedrich's house in Dresden in 1823. They struck up a close friendship and often worked side by side. Friedrich suffered a severe setback in the following year when, after the incumbent of the professorship of landscape painting at the Dresden Academy died, he was not appointed to the post. This was to have severe long-term implications for him in a highly institutionalized art academy system, since Friedrich was thus deprived of the opportunity to cultivate a following of students influenced by his ideas and methods to maintain his posthumous reputation. The major German art histories of the succeeding decades, such as Richard Muther's three-volume Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, 1893-94, failed even to mention his name.

Friedrich continued to produce wonderful canvases, which were still bought by devoted collectors, but after a stroke in 1835 he was unable to paint. By the time of Friedrich's death in 1840 he seems already to have faded from view. Dahl's subsequent attempts to auction his friend's remaining works to raise funds for his widow and children were unsuccessful, only Dahl himself buying some of the canvases and drawings.

Ironically, it was a Norwegian art historian, Andreas Aubert, who rediscovered Friedrich almost by chance, when he came to Dresden to research the works of his fellow countryman Dahl in the late 1880s and 90s.

'Friedrich, the most German of all German painters, has been forgotten by Germany,' wrote the Norwegian in the Berlin journal 'Kunst und Künstler' in 1905. 'The history of German art seems to want to expunge him from its annals.'

'Dahl and Friedrich met with very different fates when it came to the judgement of posterity,' added Aubert. 'Dahl lived on in the consciousness of the Norwegian people not just as our first, but as our greatest painter.' Dahl and Friedrich, argued the Norwegian, shared the laurels as pioneers of a new art of landscape in Europe, but Friedrich was the more original of the two since 'he was born earlier as well as being more individual and more consistent in his distinctive character.'

Aubert's words marked the beginning of a renewed appreciation of Friedrich, partly assisted by the advent of Symbolism, which some of his works seemed eerily to prefigure. Hugo von Tschudi, the director of the Nationalgalerie invited Aubert to come Berlin to assist with the hanging of Friedrich's pictures at the German Centenary Exhibition at the Nationalgalerie in 1906. Since then, Friedrich has come to be regarded by many as not only the greatest of all German Romantic painters but the country's finest artist of the 19th century.

Note: This is an expanded version of the article originally first published in The Lady on 7 June 2024

Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 19 April - 4 August 2024

First published: The Lady