Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich, born on September 5, 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, and deceased on May 7, 1840, in Dresden, embodies the quintessence of German Romanticism in his quest for spiritual transcendence through landscape. Trained at the Copenhagen Academy under Jens Juel and Nicolai Abildgaard, he established himself permanently in Dresden in 1798, where he developed a profoundly original pictorial language. His career experienced a meteoric rise after the acquisition of two of his paintings in 1810 by King Frederick William III of Prussia, consecrating him as a major figure in German painting. His most fertile period, between 1808 and 1825, witnessed the creation of his most emblematic masterpieces, including “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” and “The Sea of Ice,” where solitary figures, often viewed from behind—the Rückenfiguren characteristic of his work—contemplate the sublime immensity of nature.

Friedrich’s art, deeply influenced by his Lutheran faith and personal experience of grief, transforms landscape into visual meditation on human finitude and divine infinity. His meticulous technique, founded on direct observation of nature subsequently translated into rigorously structured compositions in his studio, enabled him to create images of crystalline precision charged with intense spirituality. Having fallen into relative obscurity during the final years of his life and after his death, a victim of evolving tastes toward more descriptive art, Friedrich would be rediscovered in the early 20th century by German Expressionists and Surrealists who recognized in him a visionary precursor. His fundamental influence on the modern conceptualization of landscape as a state of mind rather than mere topographical representation establishes him as one of the most influential artists in Western art history, whose work continues to resonate profoundly with our contemporary experience of nature.

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