Sublime Romantic - Caspar David Friedrich

 View of a Harbor 

(1815)

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.

Landscape and the sublime

He sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. 



Wanderer Above Sea Fog, 1817



Sunset (Brothers) or Evening landscape with two men, 1830


The Stages of Life, 1834


Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, 1818

The serene and contemplative pose of the couple contrasts with the contortions of the half uprooted oak tree, which is itself in opposition with the verticality of the lush pine tree on the left. This irregular and asymmetrical pictorial construction—one linked with the post-Baroque aesthetic of the previous century—was fairly rare in Friedrich's work, often characterized by regular geometric arrangements. The German art historian Helmut Börsch-Supan interprets the evergreen spruce and the dead oak as symbols of the Christian worldview and defeated paganism, respectively, the path as the path of life and the waxing moon as Christ. The oak has traditionally represented history and transience, the evergreen fir-tree, the constantly renewing power of nature. The uprooted tree may represent death, yet its contrast with the clear, bright sky represents hope, eternal life, and closeness to the sublime, or Christ.

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