Back in his studio, he cobbled these together to create a new, imaginary landscape.īetween the viewer and the foggy distance, Friedrich painted a Rückenfigur, or a figure seen from behind. To construct the composition, Friedrich traveled to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains southeast of Dresden, sketching individual rocks and natural forms with intense detail. The same year, he painted the artwork that’s now nearly synonymous with his name. In 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer and began a family (the couple eventually had three children). (His reputation eventually declined, and he died in 1840 as Realism was overtaking Romanticism.) He’d secured his spot, for the moment, in the German art echelons. Soon after, in 1810, Friedrich was elected a member of the Berlin Academy, and then the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1816. It was eventually acquired by an aristocratic family living in a Bohemian castle in Tetschen (in the modern-day Czech Republic), and the painting became known as the Tetschen Altar. In fact, Friedrich conceived of the piece as a tribute to King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden (a plan quashed when the monarch was deposed in 1808). Scholars initially believed the work was a commission. Featuring the crucifixion at the top of a mountain, with three beams of light reaching into the moody, high-contrast sky, the work posits that nature-which takes up more of the frame than Christ himself-was itself divine. In 1808, Friedrich courted controversy when he completed one such landscape, Cross in the Mountains (1807–08), which he painted as an altarpiece. In 1798, Friedrich moved to Dresden, though he took frequent journeys to inspire his landscape practice. There,he studied with the well-established Danish portrait painter Jens Juel. Friedrich began studying art at the University of Greifswald in 1790, and then at the renowned Academy of Copenhagen in 1794. He was known, even then, for his melancholic and ironic personality, a seriousness reflected in his painting. Before he was 20 years old, his mother, two sisters, and a brother had all died. Friedrich exemplified these qualities as he placed one man, gazing at a vast and unknowable territory, in the middle of his canvas.įriedrich was born in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania (now northeastern Germany), in 1774. In particular, the period exalted individuals and their strong emotions. Nature-wild, unbridled, and far more powerful than 19th century Europeans-became a major subject. Throughout Europe, writers, artists, and musicians turned to emotion, imagination, and the sublime for inspiration. The aesthetic began as a reaction against the Enlightenment values (logic, rationality, order) that partially contributed to the bloody, monarch-toppling French Revolution of 1789. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is the quintessential Romantic artwork. You can even buy the image on a $69.99 hoodie. It has been used to illustrate Franz Schubert’s Winter Journey cycle, a classical music composition that evokes a gloomy, itinerant protagonist. It adorned the cover of Terry Eagleton’s 1990 philosophical tome The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Over the past two centuries, the image has become a cultural icon. ![]() “The heart is the center of the universe,” he says. Art historian Joseph Koerner, a professor at Harvard University, notes that the midpoint of the painting rests at the man’s chest. Mounted on a dark, craggy rock face, the figure stands at the center of distant, converging planes. ![]() 1818), a man wearing a dark green overcoat and boots overlooks a cloudy landscape, steadying himself with a cane. In Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca.
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