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| 'Easter Morning' (1833) by Caspar David Friedrich; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
It must be evident just by scrolling down the pages of my blog that I prefer portraits over landscapes and still lifes. But I love the work of the German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, born on September 5, 1774, and died on May 7, 1840. I do like his paintings of landscapes with solitary figures in them better than the paintings of just landscapes but even the latter ones are stunning. His landscapes are desolate and seem to tell a story. I have been to Die Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin some years ago and they have a room dedicated to Friedrich. Upon entering it, you get immediately drawn in by the light in his dark paintings. In 2008, I saw a small Friedrich exhibition in the Hermitage, Amsterdam, and I experienced the same. Friedrich was one of the greatest Romantic painters of the symbolic landscape. He studied in Copenhagen and settled in Dresden afterwards. His paintings are beautiful observations of nature based entirely on landscapes in northern Germany. He used people in his paintings to emphasize nature's vastness and they appear with their backs to the viewer, lost in contemplation. He also wanted to show man at the mercy of the elements. It could be that his dark paintings reflect a tragedy from his childhood. When he was 13 years old, he fell through the surface of a frozen lake and was almost killed. His brother drowned in the effort to save his life.
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