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Biography
Born in Greifswald, a small town in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (at the time Swedish territory, now Germany) Friedrich was the son of a candle-maker, from whom he received a religious education which would influence his work. Another possible influence on Friedrich's work was the witnessing of the premature death of one of his brothers while ice skating in the frozen Baltic Sea. The brother was attempting to save Caspar from falling through the ice when he fell through himself. As well, his mother died when he was seven and two of his sisters died before he was 18. These difficulties experienced in childhood could be possible reasons for the tragic and sometimes lugubrious visions portrayed in his art.
After previous lessons of drawing and etching with a local master, Quistorp, Friedrich studied at Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 under Nikolaj Abraham Abildgaard and Jens Juel. After leaving Copenhagen, he visited several scenic spots in Germany before settling in Dresden. There he was in touch with the best cultural and artistical personalities of the time in Germany like Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Schelling, Phillip Otto Runge and Carl Gustav Carus. Fellow artists and friends described him as a mysterious and mystic character, with an almost monkish lifestyle. His studio was bare and kept only the essential tools for work. He needed solitude and introspection to achieve his visions as he wrote: "Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards." (continued on the bottom)
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After a long period of bachelorhood devoted to his art, he married young Caroline Bommer in 1818. They had three children (one of them, Emma, died in childhood). This led him to value having human figures in his compositions. In 1817 he became a member of the Academy of Dresden and around 1820 Nicholas I, future Czar of Russia, visited his studio and became one of his patrons which led to the purchase of many paintings. Frederick William III, king of Prussia, was also an enthusiast of his art. Although his reserved and introspective personality was an obstacle to success, by this time he was a recognized and successful painter. The years immediately prior to his death were made painful by declining health (in 1835 he suffered a stroke) which prevented him from painting in oil. Caspar David Friedrich died in Dresden.
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1830-1835 Chalk cliffs on Rügen, 1830 The sea of ice, 1824 (mistankenly known as "The wreck of the Hope" which was destroyed in 20th century)After the development of sepia drawings and watercolours (mainly naturalistic and topographical), Friedrich took up oil painting after the age of thirty. His paintings were modeled on his sketches and studies of scenic spots, like the cliffs on Rügen, the surroundings of Dresden or Elbe and later composed in symbolic, often symmetrically balanced, compositions. His first mature style painting is the "Tetschen Altar" (1807) in which the crucified Christ is seen in profile in the top of a mountain, alone, surrounded by nature. In his time this work was not unanimously accepted for the principal role of landscape in a religious subject, however, this was his first appraised painting.
Friedrich's masterpieces were almost forgotten by the general public in the second half of 19th century and only at the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century he was rediscovered by Symbolist painters for his visionary and allegorical landscapes. For that same reason Max Ernst and other surrealists saw him as a precursor of their movement. As well as other romantic painters like Turner or Constable he made landscape painting a major genre in western art. Friedrich's style influenced the painting of the Norwegian Johann Christian Dahl but the successors of his painting style did not achieve his mastery and depth. Arnold Böcklin was strongly influenced by his work and perhaps also the painters of the American Hudson River School, the Rocky Mountain School, and the New England Luminists.