Caspar David Friedrich | |
---|---|
Nationality | German |
Known for | Painting |
Movement | German Romantic movement |
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.[1] He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or gothic ruins. Friedrich's primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. He typically sets human figures in diminished perspective against expansive landscapes, however in doing so, he reduces the human element to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, acts as a devise to direct "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".[2]
Friedrich was born in the Swedish Pomeranian town of Greifswald, where he began his studies in art as a youth. Later, he studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with an over-materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837) sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".[3]
Friedrich’s work brought him renown early on in his career, and contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d'Angers (1788-1856) spoke of him as a man who had discovered "the tragedy of landscape".[4] However, his work fell from favour during his later years, and he died in obscurity, and in the words of the art historian Philip Miller "half mad".[5] As Germany moved towards modernisation, a new sense of urgency characterised its art, and Friedrich’s contemplative depictions of stillness came to be seen as the products of a bygone age. The early 20th century saw a renewed appreciation of his work, beginning in 1906 with an exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings and sculpture in Berlin. By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, while the 1930s and early 1940s saw Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drawing on his work. The rise of Nazism in the early 1930 again saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, misinterpreted as having a nationalist aspect.[6] It took until the late 1980s for Friedrich to regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.
Life
Early years and family
Caspar David Friedrich was born on September 5, 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on the Baltic Sea.[7] The sixth of ten children, he grew up under the strict Lutheran creed of his father Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, a candle-maker and soap boiler.[3]
Record of the family's financial circumstances is contradictory; while some sources indicated the children were privately tutored, others record that they were raised in relative poverty.[9] Caspar David was familiar with death from an early age, losing his mother, two sisters and a brother before he reached eighteen. His mother, Sophie Dorothea Bechly, died in 1781 when he was just seven.[10] A year later, his sister Elisabeth died,[11] while a second sister, Maria, succumbed to typhus in 1791.[12] Arguably the greatest tragedy of his childhood was the 1787 death of his brother Johann Christoffer: at the age of thirteen, Caspar David witnessed his younger brother fall through the ice of a frozen lake and drown.[13] Some accounts suggest that Johann Christoffer perished while trying to rescue his brother, who was also in danger on the ice.[14]
Friedrich began his formal study of art in 1790 as a private student of artist Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald. Quistorp took his students on outdoor drawing excursions; as a result, Friedrich was encouraged to sketch from life at an early age.[15] Through Quistorp, Friedrich met and was subsequently influenced by the theologian Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who taught that nature was a revelation of God.[15] During this period he also studied literature and aesthetics with Swedish professor Thomas Thorild. Four years later Friedrich entered the prestigious Academy of Copenhagen , where he began his education by making copies of casts from antique sculptures before proceeding to drawing from life.[16] Living in Copenhagen afforded the young painter access to the Royal Picture Gallery’s collection of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. At the Academy he studied under teachers such as Christian August Lorentzen and the landscape painter Jens Juel. These artists were inspired by the Sturm und Drang movement and represented a midpoint between the dramatic intensity and expressive manner of the budding Romantic aesthetic and the waning neo-classical ideal. Mood was paramount, and influence was drawn from such sources as the Icelandic legend of Edda, the poems of Ossian and Norse mythology.[17]
In 1798 Friedrich settled permanently in Dresden. During this early period he experimented with etching and printmaking[18] but soon gravitated toward working primarily with ink, watercolour and sepias. With the exception of a few early pieces, such as Landscape with Temple in Ruins (1797), he did not work extensively with oils until his reputation was more established.[19] Landscapes were his preferred subject, inspired by frequent trips, beginning in 1801, to the Baltic coast, Bohemia, the Riesen Mountains and the Harz Mountains.[20] Mostly based on the landscapes of northern Germany, his paintings depict woods, hills, harbors, morning mists and other light effects based on a close observation of nature. The paintings of this time were modeled on sketches and studies of scenic spots, like the cliffs on Rügen, and the surroundings of Dresden or Elbe. The studies were executed almost exclusively in pencil, and provided topographical information; the subtle atmospheric effects characteristic of Friedrich's maturity were rendered from memory.[21] These effects would eventually be most concerned with the depiction of light, of the illumination of sun and moon on clouds and water; optical phenomena specific to the Baltic coast that had never been painted before.[22]
Dresden
Friedrich's recognition as an artist began when he won a prize at the Weimar competition in 1805 organised by the writer, poet, and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). At the time, the Weimar competition tended to draw mid-brow and now long forgotten artists presenting a mixture of neo-classical, pseudo Greek or derivative art. Because of the poor standard of entries into Goethe's competition, the poet's reputation risked being damaged. When Friedrich entered two sepia drawings - Procession at Dawn and Fisher-Folk by the Sea, Goethe responded enthusiastically and wrote, "We must praise the artist's resourcefulness in this picture fairly. The drawing is well done, the procession is ingenious and appropriate...his treatment combines a great deal of firmness, diligence and neatness..the ingenious watercolour...is also worthy of praise."[23]
Friedrich completed one of his first major paintings in 1807, at the age of 34. The Cross in the Mountains, today known as the The Tetschen Altar (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), was an altarpiece panel commissioned by the Countess of Thun for her family's chapel in Tetschen, Bohemia. It was to be one of the few commissions the artist recieved. [24] The alter panel depicts the crucified Christ in profile at the top of a mountain, alone and surrounded by nature. The cross reaches the highest point in the pictorial plane, but is presented from an oblique and a distant viewpoint. Unusual for a crucifixion scene to this point in Western art. Nature dominates the scene and for the first time in Christian art, a pure landscape is the panel of an altarpiece. According to the art historian Linda Siegel, the design of the altarpiece is the "logical climax of many earlier drawings of his which depicted a cross in nature's world."[24]
The work was first exhibited on Christmas day, 1808,[24] and although it was generally coldly recieved, it was, at least, Friedrich's first painting to gain wide appraisal. Friedrich's friends publicly defended the work, while the artist and critic Basilius von Ramdohr published a lengthy article rejecting Friedrich's use of landscape in such a context; he wrote that it would be "a veritable presumption, if landscape painting were to sneak into the church and creep onto the altar".[25] Rahmdohr was fundamentally challenged whether a pure landscape painting could convey explicit meaning.[25] Friedrich later wrote a programme describing his intentions with the picture. In his 1809 commentary on the painting, he compared the rays of the evening sun to the light of the Holy Father.[26] That the sun is sinking suggests that the time when God reveals himself directly to man is past. This was to be the first and last time Friedrich offered or recorded a detailed interpretation on his own work.
Friedrich was elected a member of the Berlin Academy in 1810, following the purchase of two of his paintings by the Prussian Crown prince.[27] In 1816, he sought to distance himself from Prussian authority, and that June applied for Saxon citizenship. The move was unexpected by his friends, as the Saxon authority of the time was pro-French, while Friedrich's paintings to date were seen as generally patriotic and distinctly anti-French. However, with the aid of his Dresden-based friend Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Friedrich attained not only citizenship, but in 1818, a place in the Saxon Academy as a member with a yearly dividend of 150 thalers.[28] Although he had hopes to attain full Professorship, it was never awarded to him as, according to the German Library of Information, "it was felt that his painting was too personal, his point of view too individual to serve as a fruitful example to students."[29]
Marriage and success
On 21 January 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, then twenty-five years old and the daughter of a dyer from Dresden and a gentle, unassuming woman.[27] The couple had three children, with their first, Emma, arriving in 1820. Carus notes that marriage did not impact significantly on either Friedrich's life or personality, yet his canvasses from this period, including Chalk Cliffs on Rügen—painted after his honeymoon—display a new sense of levity, while his palette is brighter and with less of his earlier sense of austerity.[30] Human figures appear with increasing frequency in the paintings of this period, as Siegel believes as a reflection of the fact that "the importance of human life, particularly his family, now occupies his thoughts more and more, and his friends, his wife, and his townspeople appear as frequent subjects in his art."[31]
Around this time, the artist found support from two sources in Russia. The Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, at the behest of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, visited Friedrich's studio in 1820, and returned to Saint Petersburg with a number of his paintings. Nikolia's patronage was to continue for many years.[32] The poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor of heir to the throne Alexander II, met Friedrich in 1821 and found in him a kindred spirit. Over many years Zhukovsky helped Friedrich by purchasing his work and recommending his art to the royal family, especially at the end of Friedrich's career, by which time he was poor. Zhukovsky said that his friend's paintings "please us by their precision, each of them awakening a memory in our mind."[33]
Friedrich was acquainted with Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), another leading German painter of the Romantic period. He was a friend of Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847), who painted him at work in his unadorned studio, and the Norwegian painter Johann Christian Dahl (1788-1857). 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".[34] While the poet Zhukovsky appreciated Friedrich's psychological themes, Dahl attended to the descriptive quality of Friedrich's landscapes. Dahl said, "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".[33]
Later life and death
Over the course of the final 15 years of his life, both Friedrich's artistic ability and reputation steadily declined. As the ideals of early Romanticism passed from fashion, he came to be viewed as an eccentric and melancholy character and out of touch with the times. Gradually his patrons fell away,[35] By 1820, he was living as a recluse, and was described by friends as the "most solitary of the solitary".[29] Towards the end of his life he lived in relative poverty, and was increasingly dependent on the charity of friends.[20] He became isolated and spent long periods of the day and night walking alone through woods and fields, often beginning his strolls before sunlight.
During the mid-1830s, Friedrich began a series of portraits and he returned to observing himself in nature. However, as the art historian William Vaughan has observed, "He can see himself as a man greatly changed. He is no longer the upright, supportive figure that appeared in "Two Men Contemplating the Moon" in 1819. He is old and stiff...he moves with a stoop".[36]
In June 1835,he suffered his first stroke, which left him with minor limb paralysis and greatly reduced his ability to paint.[37] As a result he was unable to work in oil; instead he was limited to watercolour, sepia and reworking older compositions. Although his vision remained strong, he had lost the full strength of his hand. Yet he was able to produce a final 'black painting'; Seashore by Moonlight (1835-36), described by Vaughan as the "darkest of all his shorelines, in which richness of tonality compensates for the lack of his former finesse".[38] Symbols of death appeared heavily in his other work from this period.[35]
Soon after his stroke, the Russian Royal family purchased a number of his earlier works, and the proceeds allowed him to travel to Teplitz—in todays Czech Republic—to recover.[39] By 1838 he was incapable of working beyond the smallest picture and he grew increasingly dependent for support on the charity of friends; he and his family living in great poverty. [40] His death in May 1840 caused little stir within in the artistic community.[41]
Art
Landscape
Friedrich's key innovation was his discovery of visualising and portraying landscape in an entierly new manner. He created the notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling—die romantische stimmungslandschaft.[42] His art details a broad range of gepgraphical features; including rock coasts, forests and mountain scenes. Friedrich was key in transforming landscape in art from a mere backdrop to human drama to an emotive object of itself.[43]
German folklore
Reflecting Friedrich's patriotism and resentment during the 1813 French occupation of the dominion Pomerania, references to German folklore became increasingly prominent in his work. An anti-French German nationalist, Friedrich used motifs from his native landscape to celebrate Germanic culture, customs and mythology. He was impressed by the anti-Napoleonic poetry of Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner, and the patriotic literature of Adam Müller and Heinrich von Kleist.[44] Moved by the deaths of three friends killed in battle against France, as well as by Kleist's 1808 drama "Die Hermannsschlacht", Friedrich undertook a number of paintings in which he intended to convey political symbols solely by means of the landscape—a first in the history of art. In Old Heroes' Graves (1812), 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 further from heaven.[45] A second political painting, Fir Forest with the French Dragoon and the Raven (c. 1813), depicts a lost French soldier dwarfed by a dense forest, while on a tree stump a raven is perched—a prophet of doom, symbolizing the anticipated defeat of France.[46]
Spirituality
Friedrich's often used the landscape genre to evoke religious themes. During his time most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism. 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.
"What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer".—Caspar David Friedrich.[47] |
Friedrich said, "The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead."[48] Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins, and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes. Though death finds symbolic expression in boats that move away from shore - a Charon like motif - and in the poplar tree, it is referenced more directly in paintings like The Abbey in the Oakwood, in which monks carry a coffin past an open grave, toward a cross, through the portal of a church in ruins.
The bare oak trees are a recurring element of Friedrich's paintings, symbolizing the "pagan aspect" of death. Countering the sense of despair are Friedrich's symbols for redemption: the cross and the clearing sky promise eternal life, and the slender moon suggests hope and the growing closeness of Christ.[49] In his paintings of the sea, anchors often appear on the shore, also indicating a spiritual hope.[45] Writing in Studies in Romanticism, Alice Kuzniar finds in Friedrich's painting a temporality—an evocation of the passage of time—that is rarely granted in the visual arts.[50] In The Abbey in the Oakwood, the movement of the monks away from the open grave and toward the cross and the horizon imparts Friedrich's message that the final destination of man's life lies beyond the grave.[51]
With dawn and dusk constituting prominent themes of his landscapes, Friedrich's own later years were characterized by a growing pessimism. His work becomes darker, revealing a fearsome monumentalism. The Wreck of Hope—also known as The Polar Sea or Sea of Ice—perhaps best summarizes Friedrich's ideas and aims at this point, though in such a radical way that the painting was not well received. Painted in 1824, it depicted a grim subject, a shipwreck in the Arctic Ocean. That same year Friedrich was appointed professor at the Academy in Dresden. Between 1830 and 1835 he became more reclusive, and he dismissed the opinions of critics and the public by only painting for his family and friends—yet his art from this period can be considered among his finest. His well-known and especially Romantic painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog impressed Karl Friedrich Schinkel—later Prussia's most famous classicist architect—to the extent that he gave up painting and took up architecture.
Friedrich's written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of aphorisms set down in 1830, in which he explained the need for the artist to match natural observation with an introspective scrutiny of his own personality. His best-known remark advises the artist to "close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards."[52] He rejected the overreaching portrayals of nature in its "totality", as found in the work of contemporary painters like Ludwig Richter and Joseph Anton Koch.
Fiedrich sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and the afterlife, a number of the funerary art in Dresden's cemeteries is his. Some of his paintings were lost in the fire that destroyed Munich's Glass Palace (1931) and in the bombing of Dresden in World War II.
Legacy
Friedrich was almost forgotten in his homeland by the time of his death in 1840. Though his artwork complied with the early Romantic aesthetic, his close study of landscape and emphasis on the spiritual elements of nature were commonplace in what was then contemporary art.[1] By 1838, his work no longer sold or received interest from critics; the Romantic movement was moving away from the early idealism that the artist had helped found, due to changing taste. Following his death, Carus wrote a series of articles for Schorn's Kunstblatt which payed tribute to the manner in which Friedrich had transformed the conventions of landscape painting. However, Carus' articles placed Friedrich firmly in his time, and did not see the artist as part of a continuing tradition.[53]
"I am no so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot." |
[54] |
Some of his contemporaries attributed the melancholy in his art to the tragedies of his youth.[55] As an adult, the pale and withdrawn Friedrich reinforced the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North".[56] His letters, however, contain humour and self-irony, and in his autobiography, the natural philosopher Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert wrote Friedrich, "was indeed a strange mixture of temperament, his moods ranging from the gravest seriousness to the gayest humour … But anyone who knew only this side of Friedrich's personality, namely his deep melancholic seriousness, only knew half the man. I have met few people who have such a gift for telling jokes and such a sense of fun as he did, providing that he was in the company of people he liked."[57]
French sculptor David D'Angers, who visited Friedrich in 1834, was moved by the devotional issues explored in the artist's canvasses. He exclaimed to Carl Gustav Carus in 1834, "Friedrich! … The only landscape painter so far to succeed in stirring up all the forces of my soul, the painter who has created a new genre: the tragedy of the landscape."[58]
Alongside other Romantic painters Friedrich helped position landscape painting as a major genre within Western art. Of his contemporaries, Friedrich's style influenced the painting of Dahl. In subsequent generations, Arnold Böcklin was strongly influenced by his work, and his spiritualism anticipates the painters of the American Hudson River School, the White Mountain artists, the Rocky Mountain School, the New England Luminists and American painters like Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Blakelock.
At the turn of the century Friedrich was rediscovered by the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert,[20] and by the Symbolist painters, who valued his visionary and allegorical landscapes. It was this aspect of his work that caused Max Ernst and other Surrealists to see him as a precursor to their movement. More recently, exhibitions in London in 1972 and Hamburg in 1974 have further his international reputation.[20]
Today, Friedrich's international reputation is well established. He is a national icon in his native Germany, and highly regarded by postmodernists accross the western world. He is generally viewed as a figure of great pyschological complexity, according to Vaughan, "an believer who struggled with doubt, a celebrator of beauty haunted by darkness. In the end, he transcends interpretation, reaching accross cultures through the compleeing appeal of his imagery. He has truly emerged as a butterful-hopefully one that will never again dissappear from our sight".[59]
Citations
- ^ a b Vaughan (1980), 65
- ^ Murray, 338
- ^ a b Vaughan (2004), 7
- ^ On an 1834 visit to Dresden; quoted in Vaughan (2004), 295
- ^ Miller, Philip B. "Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich". Art Journal, Volume 33, No. 3, Spring, 1974. 205-210
- ^ Forster-Hahn, Françoise. "Recent Scholarship on Caspar David Friedrich". The Art Bulletin, Volume 58, No. 1, March, 1976. 113-116
- ^ Pomerania had been divided between Sweden and Brandenburg-Prussia since 1648, and at the time of Caspar David's birth, it was still part of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon occupied the territory in 1806, and in 1815 all of Pomerania fell under Prussian sovereignty. Johnston, 12
- ^ Guillaud, 170–171
- ^ Wolf, 17
- ^ The family was subsequently raised by their housekeeper and nurse, "Mutter Heide", who had a warm relationship with all of the Friedrich children.
- ^ Vaughan (2004), 18
- ^ Wolf, 17
- ^ Siegel, 8
- ^ Boime, 512
- ^ a b Johnston, 12
- ^ Vaughan (2004), 26
- ^ Vaughan (2004), 29
- ^ Vaugn (2004), 48
- ^ Vaugn (2004), 41
- ^ a b c d Johnston, 45
- ^ Johnston, 106
- ^ Johnston, 14
- ^ Siegel, 43-44
- ^ a b c Siegel, 55-56
- ^ a b Vaughan (1980), 7
- ^ Johnston, 116
- ^ a b Vaughan (1980), 101
- ^ Vaughan (2004), 165-166
- ^ a b German Library of Information. "Caspar David Friedrich: His Life and Work". New York: German Library of Information, 1940. 38.
- ^ Börsch-Supan, 41–45
- ^ Siegel, 114
- ^ Updike, John. "Innerlichkeit and Eigentümlichkeit". The New York Review of Books, Volume 38, Number 5, March 7, 1991. Retrieved on October 22, 2008.
- ^ a b Vaughan (1980), 66
- ^ Schmied, Wieland. Caspar David Friedrich. Michigan: H.N. Abrams, 1995. 48. ISBN 0-8109-3327-6
- ^ a b Vaughan (2004), 263
- ^ Vaughan (2004), 295-296
- ^ Schmied, 44
- ^ Vaughan (2004), 300-302
- ^ Vaughn (2004), 300
- ^ Guillaud, p.128, originally from Vaughan (1972)
- ^ German Library of Information, 39
- ^ Beenken, Hermann. "Caspar David Friedrich". The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Volume 72, No. 421, April 1938. 171-175
- ^ Mitchell, Timothy. "Caspar David Friedrich's Der Watzmann: German Romantic Landscape Painting and Historical Geology". The Art Bulletin, Volume 66, No. 3, September 1984. 452-464
- ^ Kleist was the first member of the Romantic movement to discuss Friedrich in print. See: Siegel, Linda.
- ^ a b Siegel, Linda. "Synaesthesia and the Paintings of Caspar David Friedrich". Art Journal, Vol. 33, No. 3, Spring 1974. 196–204.
- ^ The scene is an allusion to Act V, scene 3 of Kleist's Die Hermannsschlacht. Siegel, Linda. Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism. Branden Books, 1978. 87–88. ISBN 0828316597. See also: Siegel, Linda. "Synaesthesia and the Paintings of Caspar David Friedrich". Art Journal, Vol. 33, No. 3, Spring 1974. 196–204.
- ^ Mitchell, Timothy. "Caspar David Friedrich's Der Watzmann: German Romantic Landscape Painting and Historical Geology". The Art Bulletin, Vol. 66, No. 3, September, 1984. 452–464
- ^ Quoted in Borsch-Supan, 7–8
- ^ Borsch-Supan, Helmut. "Caspar David Friedrich's Landscapes with Self-Portraits". The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 114, No. 834, September 1972. 620–630.
- ^ Kuzniar, Alice. "The Temporality of Landscape: Romantic Allegory and C. D. Friedrich". Studies in Romanticism. Vol. 28, 1989. 69–93.
- ^ Borsch-Supan, 84
- ^ Vaughan (1980), 68
- ^ Vaughan (2004), 309
- ^ Russell, John. "Art born in the fullness of age". New York Times, August 23, 1987. Retrieved on October 25, 2008.
- ^ Borsch-Supan, 11
- ^ Vaughan (1980), 64
- ^ Schubert was in Dresden from 1806 to 1819, and knew Friedrich closely. Quoted in Borsch-Supan, 16.
- ^ Grewe, Cordula, "Heaven on Earth: Cordula Grewe on Caspar David Friedrich". Artforum International, Vol. 44, No. 9, May 2006. 133.
- ^ Vaughan (2004), 332
Bibliography
- Boele, Vincent and Foppema, Femke (eds.). Caspar David Friedrich & the German Romantic Landscape. Amsterdam: Hermitage Amsterdam, 2008. ISBN 9789040085680
- Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815: A Social History of Modern Art, Vol.2. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1990. ISBN 0-2260-6335-6
- Börsch-Supan, Helmut (tr. Twohig, Sarah). Casper David Friedrich. New York: George Braziller, 1974. ISBN 0-8076-0747-9
- Dahlenburg, Birgit & Carsten, Spitzer. "Major Depression and Stroke in Caspar David Friedrich". In Bougousslavsky, J. & Boller, F.: Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists. New York : Karger, c2005. ISBN 3-8055-7914-4
- Guillaud, Maurice & Guillaud, Jacqueline. Casper David Friedrich, line and transparency. Exhibition catalogue, The Centre Culturel du Marais, Paris. Paris: Guillaud Editions, Rizzoli, 1984. ISBN 0-8478-5408-6
- Hofmann, Werner. Caspar David Friedrich. Thames & Hudson: New York, 2000. ISBN 0-500-09295-8
- Johnston, Catherine, et al. Baltic Light: Early Open-Air Painting in Denmark and North Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-300-08166-9
- Murray, Christopher John. Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850. ISBN 1-5795-8423-3
- Rewald, Sabine (ed.). The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich . The Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 1990. ISBN 0-87099-603-7
- Siegel, Linda. Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism. Branden Publishing Co, 1978. ISBN 0-8283-1659-7
- Vaughan, William.German Romantic Painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-300-02387-1
- Vaughan, William. Friedrich. London: Phaidon Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7148-4060-2
- Vaughan, William. Caspar David Friedrich, 1972, Exhibition Cataloque, Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden, Tate Gallery, London, 6 September-16 October, 1972, ISBN 0900874368.
- Werner, Christoph. Um ewig einst zu leben. Caspar David Friedrich und Joseph Mallord William Turner. Weimar: Bertuch Verlag, 2006. ISBN 3-937601-34-1
- Wolf, Norbert. Friedrich. Cologne: Taschen, 2003. ISBN 3-8228-2293-0
External links
- Caspar David Friedrich Foundation
- Hermitage Museum Archive
- Web Gallery of Art - comprehensive collection of Friedrich's works
- Artcyclopedia - links to Friedrich's pictures from Image Archives, articles etc