Caspar David Friedrich

1774 - 1840 • German • Painter • Romantic

"Why, it has often occurred to me to ask myself, do I so frequently choose death, transience, and the grave as subjects for my paintings? One must submit oneself many times to death in order some day to attain life everlasting." - Caspar David Friedrich

Like RUNGE, who was three years younger, Friedrich studied with Jens Juel (1745-1802) at the academy in Copenhagen. Friedrich also shared Runge's pantheism, but with a more objectively based foundation-Friedrich was a topological draftsman before he devoted himself to painting. He painted the wild Baltic coast, which appealed to the ROMANTIC taste of the era. Increasingly reverential, Friedrich's landscapes have an awe-inspiring silence and stillness: for example, Cloister Graveyard in the Snow (c. 1810), among barren trees in a misty setting, with toppling crosses and the skeleton of a church in the snow. In The Monk by the Sea (1809-10) the monk is a small, dark, distant figure at the sea's edge, standing beneath a vast sky that occupies three-quarters of the canvas. The Cross in the Mountains ( 1807-8) presents an Alpine peak with dark fir trees, clouds glowing in the sunset, light radiating as though from the ground, and a high crucifixion at the pinnacle of the hill. It appears as if to take the place of another tree, and, in fact, has foliage winding around its shaft. Friedrich was a Protestant, but his attitude toward religion transcended sectarianism - The Cross in the Mountains was bought by Catholics and used as an ALTARPIECE in their private chapel. Not everyone approved-the chancellor of the Saxon court and author of a treatise on aesthetics denounced the painting as endangering good taste and representative of the "calamitous spirit of the present times."