Caspar David Friedrich Prints

About Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was born in September 1774 in Greifswald, a Baltic port then under Swedish rule, and studied at the Academy in Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 before settling in Dresden, where he lived for the rest of his life. He made sketching journeys to the Baltic coast, the Harz and the Bohemian mountains, and assembled his paintings in the studio from those drawings, often combining motifs from different places. The Cross in the Mountains of 1808, an altarpiece in which the crucifix stands on a summit against a sunset, caused a public argument about whether landscape could carry religious meaning; it was his first major painting. The Berlin Academy elected him in 1810 and the Dresden Academy in 1818. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, from about 1818, and The Sea of Ice of 1823 to 1824, both in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, use his characteristic figure seen from behind, or no figure at all, to put the viewer inside the scene. He died in Dresden in May 1840, largely forgotten, and was rediscovered after a Berlin exhibition in 1906. Friedrich's landscapes are about stillness and scale, and both come through on a wall: a single figure, a long horizon, a great deal of sky.