“If Friedrich meant to imply Presence with his controlled, emptied vistas, and we can feel only Absence, well, Absence is an old friend, and we wouldn’t know what to do with Presence if it came up and hit us in the face.”ġ9th-century thinkers and poets were searching for divinity in personal contemplation. “This insistent geometry accords with our modern sense of artistic decorum,” John Updike wrote. Tree trunks mark the centre of the composition or frame it diagonal branches do not project beyond the frame. His compositions are well-balanced, often symmetrical. However, the writer Ludwig Tieck claimed that Friedrich had sensed the spirit of the era: “Friedrich expresses the religious mood and excitement that recently seems to have stirred our German world in a particular manner, in sensitive, solemn, melancholy landscape motives.”įriedrich painted his pictures in the studio, based on earlier sketches drawn on location. Critics were doubtful as to whether being moved by the spectacle of the fog should be associated with religious elation. Friedrich’s contemporaries often exaggerated the religious aspect of his works, envisaging their artificially sophisticated mysticism. Answering his critics’ objections, the artist explained that “Jesus Christ, nailed to the tree, is turned here towards the setting sun, the image of the eternal life-giving father.” Yet this does not necessarily mean that the sun always symbolizes God in his works, and that evergreen trees should be associated with the hope of resurrection. Cherubs, stalks of grains and wine chalices carved into the frame created the correct context, however Friedrich’s lonely cross covered with ivy was not so much a religious symbol as an element of the landscape. Only later on did Count Anton von Thun-Hohenstein insist on placing this painting in his palace chapel. von Ramdohr was scathing when he wrote that it was “a veritable presumption, if landscape painting were to sneak into the church and creep onto the altar.” Indeed, this was supposed to be a secular landscape. However, Friedrich’s Tetschen Altar (1808) provoked a controversy: a simple cross on a rock surrounded by spruces against the background of the sky turning pink.

The latter praised the beauty of nature leading to the meeting with God.įriedrich Schiller himself said in 1794 that landscape is perfect for expressing both ideas and emotions. Thanks to his first painting teacher he met the philosopher and pantheist, Thomas Thorild, and the poet, preacher and theologist Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten.

Caspar David Friedrich was born in Greifswald, on the territory of the then Swedish Pomerania, in the family of a soap-boiler with a strong, Protestant history.

Accustomed to the school-level version of Romanticism, we sometimes forget that it was “the fallen religion”. “Just as the pious man prays without speaking a word and the Almighty hearkens unto him, so the artist with true feelings paints and the sensitive man understands and recognises it.”įriedrich’s painting was created 200 years ago, and we, as its viewers, rank among the more thick-witted. Friedrich himself likened his work of art to a prayer.

No other painter has possibly ever created a comparable icon of solitude in the face of the forces of nature no other painter has so emphatically shown the melancholy of unfulfilled hopes. Further away, on the horizon, a mountain range looms wrapped in a morning haze. At his feet, a spectacle of nature takes place: clouds are lifting from a valley, exposing rocky ridges. It shows a man from behind, with a cane, wearing an overcoat, standing on a protruding rock. W anderer above the Sea of Fog also often ends up on the covers of books about German Romantic painting. Three years earlier, Caspar David Friedrich painted a picture that often illustrates the recordings of the Austrian composer’s song. The stranger looks for a spiritual home everywhere, but is condemned to wander forever. This is the lamenting of the Wanderer from a song composed by 19-year-old Franz Schubert to the words of G.P.

Wanderer above the sea of fog