Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic painter who did mostly landscapes. He was serious about doing landscapes. Gerhard von Kügelgen decided to be a mensch and give us a portrait of our man CDF to show us just how serious about landscapes he is. Yow.

One of CDF's most important contributions (besides his work on the concept of the sublime) was the idea of an inherently emotional (in the sense of emotion-containing or emotion-inducing) landscape, which he called die romantische Stimmungslandschaft because he was German.

Anyway, CDF's work shares with Turner's several aspects that work for me: a really good sense of the play of light and air and fog. The overall effect is frequently exaggerated; the man is, after all, a Romantic. But even so, the image is more believable for it: even if it wouldn't fit in with the mundane world, it carves out its own space, its own world, all the more definitively.

Some of his paintings include Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which I could be tempted to discuss later, and The Cross in the Mountains, his first major painting, which is a panel for the Tetschen Altar, by which name it's better known. It's notably the first depiction of the crucifixion on an altar to depict it as a landscape.

CDF managed to execute some paintings after having suffered a stroke. Give the man an award, ladies and gentlemen. Those paintings were of course very dark (one: Seashore by Moonlight, and I'll leave it to you to decide if it's gloom or trepidation that that painting makes me feel; in either case, wow), and Wikipedia reports with stunning analytic insight that "symbols of death" appeared in his work from this period. Yeah, well, I can't say I blame him.

Let me show you what I mean about his use of light and air with The Abbey in the Oakwood. Some monks are carrying a coffin towards the gate left behind in the ruins of an old Gothic church. And holy god, look at the effect.

The way the dull brown glow lifts up from the ground, reaching toward the horizon, the way it's met by the remains of the daylight: it's a sunset without a sun, without the bright colors playing. It's a dying sunset, a sunset to remind anyone of autumn. (Also, I like how the color in the sky is slanted to match the motion of the monks. It's a small touch, but a neat one.)