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Caspar David Friedrich
(Sep.5, 1774 Greifswald - May 7, 1840 Dresden) German Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Caspar David Friedrich was one of the greatest exponents in European art of the symbolic landscape. He studied at the Academy in Copenhagen (1794-98) and subsequently settled in Dresden, often traveling to other parts of Germany. Friedrich's landscapes oil paintings are based entirely on those of northern Germany and are beautiful renderings of trees, hills, harbors, morning mist and other light effects, based on a close observation of nature.
Some of Caspar David Friedrich's best-known paintings are Christian art, based in nature, divested of standard biblical imagery. In 1807 he began working in oils and immediately caused a sensation, installed in a private chapel, he used landscape to evoke the spirit of the Crucifixion. Shocked by his use of secular genre for a religious purpose, critics accused Friedrich of sacrilege. Friedrich's oeuvre encompasses scenes of ruined Gothic churches, cemeteries, desolate landscapes and silent figures in vast spaces, all deeply spiritual and often melancholy. In 1808 he exhibited one of his most controversial paintings, The Cross in the Mountains (Gemaldegalerie, Dresden), in which, for the first time in Christian art, an altarpiece was conceived in terms of a pure landscape. The cross, viewed obliquely from behind, is an insignificant element in the composition. More important are the dominant rays of the evening sun, which the artist said depicted the setting of the old, pre-Christian world. The mountain symbolizes an immovable faith, while the fir trees are an allegory of hope. Friedrich painted several other important compositions in which crosses dominate a landscape.
Even some of Friedrich's apparently non-symbolic paintings contain inner meanings, clues to which are provided either by the artist's writings or those of his literary friends. For example, a landscape showing a The Tree of Crows, can be appreciated on one level as a bleak twisted scene, but the painter also intended the composition to represent both the church shaken by the Reformation, going in different directions and the transition of earthly things.
He was the first artist to create awe before nature and to infuse landscape and light with emotional and symbolic content. By 1835 Friedrich was nearly paralyzed and could make only sepia landscapes. He died in Dresden sad, lonely, and poor. His immediate influence was confined to a few students, but his work was rediscovered at century's end.
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The Cross in the Mountains
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Chalk Cliffs on Rugen
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The Tree of Crows
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