Caspar David Friedrich - Two Men Contemplating the Moon [c.1825-30]

Caspar David Friedrich - Two Men Contemplating the Moon [c.1825-30], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This is the third version of one of this artist's most famous paintings, of which the first (1819) is in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, and the second (c.1824) is in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. The two men contemplating the sinking moon have been identified as Friedrich himself, on the right, and his talented young colleague August Heinrich (1794-1822). The mood of pious contemplation relates to fascination with the moon as expressed in contemporary poetry, literature, philosophy, and music. Both figures are seen from the back so that the viewer can participate in their communion with nature, which the Romantics saw as a manifestation of the Sublime.

Although the landscape is imaginary, it is based on studies after nature that Friedrich had made in various regions at different times. Both men wear Old German dress, which had been adopted in 1815 by radical students as an expression of opposition to the ultraconservative policies then being enforced in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. The staunchly patriotic Friedrich deliberately ignored the 1819 royal decree forbidding this practice and depicted figures in traditional costume until his death.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 34.9 x 43.8 cm]

Caspar David Friedrich - A Walk at Dusk [c.1830-35]

Caspar David Friedrich - A Walk at Dusk [c.1830-35], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

His head bowed, a man walks alone in the silvery, cold moonlit night while contemplating a megalithic tomb and its implicit message of death. It is winter, and all around him nature is dying. Leafless trees loom behind like specters, but a grove of verdant oaks rises through the mist in the background with the promise of life. The waxing moon, high in the sky, also acts as a counterbalance to death, symbolising Christ and the promise of rebirth for the artist Caspar David Friedrich. 

Friedrich (Greifswald, 1774 - Dresden, 1840) was part of the German Romantic movement; his deeply personal and introspective vision addressed Christian themes through analogies based on the cycles of nature. A Walk at Dusk was among a small group of works Friedrich completed before he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1835. The painting embodies both the melancholy he experienced during this period and the consolation he found in the Christian faith.

[Oil on canvas, 13.125 x 17.1875 inches]

Caspar David Friedrich - Solitary Tree [1822]

Caspar David Friedrich - Solitary Tree [1822], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In 1822 the art patron and collector, Heinrich Wagener, commissioned a “times of day” diptych from Friedrich. The morning picture became The Solitary Tree. A grassy landscape with groups of trees, ponds, and villages extends to the foothills of the mountains behind the spires of a Gothic town. One mighty oak stands like a statue in the middle of the composition. A shepherd shelters beneath it. Its great trunk has withstood wind and weather, but the tips of the branches of this giant tree have already died off. Above the tree, the clouds form of a kind of cupola. Transgressing against the classical laws of composition, Friedrich cuts through all the various levels of the picture with the tree as the central foreground axis. And thus, at a stroke the oak tree takes on the role of mediator between heaven and earth, between the transcendental and the mundane. As an image of nature, it embodies natural strength and the life force, while at the same time the withered branches point to a life beyond this one.

[Oil on canvas, 55 x 71 cm]

Caspar David Friedrich - Sunset Brothers [1830-35]

Caspar David Friedrich - Sunset Brothers [1830-35], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 25 x 31 cm]

Caspar David Friedrich - Monk By The Sea [c.1808]

Caspar David Freidrich - Monk By The Sea [c.1808], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Friedrich worked for two years on this, ultimately his most famous work. The composition is divided horizontally into land, sea, and sky with a clear simplicity that shocked his contemporaries. A monk stands, bareheaded, on the shore. Seagulls circle around him. The lonely figure faces the leaden blackness of the immeasurably vast sea. The grey band of cloud over the water surprisingly gives way to blue sky along the top edge of the picture. No artistic composition had ever been as uncompromising as this: the main space of the picture seems like an abyss of some kind; there are no boundaries, there is nothing to hold on to, just a sense of floating between night and day, between despair and hope. In 1810 Heinrich von Kleist put into words, as no other could, the magical fascination of this painting: “Nothing could be more sombre nor more disquieting than to be placed thus in the world: the one sign of life in the immensity of the kingdom of death, the lonely center of a lonely circle. With its two or three mysterious objects the picture seems somehow apocalyptic, like Young’s Night Thoughts, and since its monotony and boundlessness are only contained by the frame itself, contemplation of this picture gives one the sense that one’s eyelids have been cut away.”

[Oil on canvas, 110 x 171.5 cm]

Caspar David Friedrich - Abbey Among Oak Trees [c.1809]

Caspar David Freidrich - Abbey Among Oak Trees [c.1809], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Abbey Among Oak Trees is the companion piece to Monk by the Sea. Friedrich (Greifswald, September 5, 1774 - Dresden, May 7, 1840) showed both paintings in the Berlin Academy Exhibition of 1810. At the request of the 15-year-old crown prince, they were bought by King Friedrich Wilhelm III. In their perplexing remoteness and formal radicalism they were to become key works in German Romanticism. In Monk By The Sea a human being stands lost in the apocalyptic loneliness and infinity of nature and the cosmos. He meditates on life and its boundaries. In the companion piece, the gates of death have opened. Monks carry a coffin into a deserted Gothic ruin to hold a requiem mass under the cross. The graveyard with its crooked, sunken tombstones is equally deserted. Bare oaks reach up into the sky as though in complaint. The first light of dawn is appearing over the horizon like an ocher-yellow veil, outshining the tender curve of the crescent moon. The visionary gleam of the heavenly realm is completely detached from the earthly regions, which are still sunk in darkness. One sign of hope is in the two single lights on the crucifix. For the painter Carl Gustav Carus, who was also a friend of Friedrich’s, this painting was “of all recent landscapes, possibly the most deeply poetic work of art.”

[Oil on canvas, 110.4 x 171 cm]

Caspar David Friedrich - The Stages of Life [c.1835]

Both Friedrich's life and art are marked with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. This becomes more apparent in his later works, from a time when friends, members of his family and fellow pioneers of early romanticism began to either become distant from him or die.

Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826. There are noticeable thematic shifts in the works he produced during these episodes, which see the emergence of such motifs and death symbols as vultures, owls, graveyards and ruins. From 1826 these motifs became a permanent feature of his output, while his use of colour became more dark and muted. Carus wrote in 1929 that Friedrich "is surrounded by a thick, gloomy cloud of spiritual uncertainty", while in 2004 the psychiatrist Carsten Spitzer wrote that he believed during his life, Friedrich suffered prolonged inertia, a suicide attempt and what the artist himself described as a "dreadful weariness.”

[Oil on canvas, 72.5 x 94 cm]