Caspar David Friedrich - The Stages of Life

                                                        The Stages of Life - 1835

Museum der Bildenden Kunste - Leipzig - Germany

Casper David Friedrich the leading artist of the German Romantic Movement , translated his melancholy temperament into some of history’s most masterful landscapes. Friedrich painted the Stages of Life when he was sixty-one, five years before his death. Tough it was a pastiche of sketches he had made during different travels in his youth, “The Stages of Life” was an anomaly in his oeuvre because it was a painting of an imaginary location. The recognizable geographical references in the work are all highly personal and the landscape serves almost as an autobiography for the deeply introspective artist. The main body of the painting appears loosely based on the harbor of Greifswald where he was born, in the north of Germany. Five ships are depicted at various distances in the water. They symbolically represent the passing of life. On the shore, an old man stands in the foreground facing toward the water and it is assumed that he is Friedrich at the time of the painting. Nearby stands a young man in a top hat, modeled after his nephew, who in this context represents maturaty. Playing beyond them both is a graceful young girl, modeled after his eldest daughter, who represents youth, and portraits of his two youngest children playing with a Swedish flag, who represent childhood. The mast of the central ship forms a crucifix, a sign of Friedrich’s deep faith, yet tranquil, luminous, poetic painting is not filled with redemptive hope, or the yearning for heaven after death, but with the bittersweet awareness that mortal life is precious and passes quickly. In keeping with the Romantic ideals of the time, Friedrich intended his paintings to function purely in visual terms, and thus he was cautious that the titles given to his work were not overly descriptive or evocative. It is likely that the relatively literal title “The Stages of Life” was not given by the artist himself, but that the work was instead renamed during a revival of interest in the artistin the late 19th or early 20th century.
Source: Wikipedia, Ann Hildyard, net

Caspar David Friedrich - Wonderer Above the Sea of Fog

Wonderer Above the Sea of Fog - 1818

Kunsthalle Hamburg - Hamburg - Germany

The sublime power of nature was a dominant theme in Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840) paintings and this work is a perfect example of how the landscape of his native Germany was a source of inspiration, although Friedrich's personal history might also explain the omnious tensions between beauty and terror in his representation of nature. When he was a child, he was skating with his brother on the frozen Baltic sea when the ice cracked. Casper slipped and his brother died trying to save him. Friedrich's adult depression led to a suicide attempt in Dresden. After he tried to slit his own throat, he was always wore a beard to hide the scar. The relationship between trauma and inspiration is evident in Friedrich's statement:

"The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him".

A frightening, raging sea crashes in front of the lone, elegant figure. A young man, who stands upon a rocky precipice, is back to the viewer, wrapped in a dark green overcoat, and grips a walking stick in his right hand. His hair is caught in the wind and we may wonder what he gazes at, out there, on a garish landscape covered in a thick sea of fogin. We will never know what he was thinking about. This utterly arresting painting, which Friedrich produced the year he married, could express his own personal struggle to tame his surging emotions for the sake of his young bride. Friedrich, only began painting with oils after the age of thirty. He demonstrates a profound understanding of the medium in the depths of dark color he employs to execute his emotionally wrenching imagery. Both Friedrich's life and art are marked with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. This becomes more apparent in his later works, from a time when friends, members of his family and fellow pioneers of early romanticism began to either become distant from him or die. Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute the melancholy in his art to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, while Friedrich's pale and withdrawn appearance helped reinforce the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". Events corrupted Friedrich's legacy when Adolf Hitler chose to appropriate one of his paintings Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1830-35) for use as a Nazi propaganda. Despite that anachronistic connection, the mystical, melancholic beauty of his landscapes has endured and thankfully we are here to appreciate them as they deserve.
Sources: Anne Hildyard and Wikipedia