Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was born in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, then part of Swedish Pomerania, and raised in his father's strict Lutheran faith. He studied first with Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the university in his home town, then from 1794 to 1798 at the academy in Copenhagen under Christian August Lorentzen and Jens Juel, before settling permanently in Dresden. He is generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. His landscapes set small, contemplative figures against night skies, morning mists, bare trees and Gothic ruins, and he often used landscape to carry religious meaning; his first major painting, the Cross in the Mountains of 1808, is an altarpiece. He was among the first to paint winter as stark and still, rather than as a setting for human activity. His reputation faded in his later years and he died in obscurity, to be rediscovered in the early twentieth century. Three works here: The Monk in the Snow, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and Winter Landscape.