Caspar David Friedrich

The art of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) holds a special fascination. A unique figure in the age of Romanticism, Friedrich was as significant within the art of Germany as Eugene Delacroix was in France, or J. M. W. Turner in England. Yet his work was little known in its time, and after the artist's death it was long forgotten. Only in the twentieth century did it become apparent that Eugene Delacroix anticipated much of our modern experience of the world. Friedrich painted strange, evocative scenes whose dark tones and ambiguous meanings seem to embody the very notion of the German Romantic visionary, yet at the same time they seem to look ahead to various modern styles. Scholars have pointed out the similarity between his paintings and the symbolic seascapes of Edvard Munch, and his atmospheric landscapes have an affinity with the work of the Impressionists, yet his use of isolated figures in a limitless expanse of space, dominated by an overwhelming sky, also evokes the sensibility of the Expressionists. Others have related his work to the intimacy of Paul Klee or the lyrical landscapes of Emil Nolde. And there is a fundamental connection between Friedrich's Romanticism and a current of abstract art in our century, allowing him to be compared with painters such as Mark Rothko.