Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, then part of Swedish Pomerania. His childhood was shadowed by the early deaths of several family members; it is said that a younger brother drowned trying to rescue him after he fell through the ice. He studied at the Copenhagen Academy from 1794 to 1798 and settled in Dresden in 1798, remaining there for the rest of his life. Friedrich is the foremost painter of German Romanticism. His landscapes depict coastlines, mountains, ruins, mist and moonlit nights, often with figures seen from behind, silently contemplating the boundless natural world. Still, solemn and charged with an almost religious meditation, they express the smallness of humanity before the universe and a longing for the eternal. The Monk by the Sea, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and The Sea of Ice are among his celebrated works. In 1810 the Prussian royal family acquired his paintings, and his reputation reached its height. Two Men Contemplating the Moon, painted around 1825 to 1830, is a version of an earlier composition: at dusk two men in old German dress stand on a mountain path beside a dead tree, gazing up at a crescent moon, in a scene of stillness and mystery. His later work fell out of fashion, and after a stroke in 1835 he could barely paint. He died in obscurity in Dresden in 1840, and his art was rediscovered and celebrated only in the early twentieth century.