Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".
Philipp Otto Runge was a German artist, draftsman, painter, and color theorist. Runge and Caspar David Friedrich are often regarded as the leading painters of the German Romantic movement. He is frequently compared with William Blake by art historians, although Runge's short ten-year career is not easy to equate to Blake's career. By all accounts he had a brilliant mind and was well versed in the literature and philosophy of his time. He was a prolific letter writer and maintained correspondences and friendships with contemporaries such as Carl Ludwig Heinrich Berger, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Henrik Steffens, and Ludwig Tieck. His paintings are often laden symbolism and allegories. For eight years he planned and refined his seminal project, Tageszeiten, four monumental paintings 50 square meters each, which in turn were only part of a larger collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk that was to include poetry, music, and architecture, but remained unrealized at the time of his death. With it he aspired to abandon the traditional iconography of Christianity in European art and find a new expression for spiritual values through symbolism in landscapes. One historian stated "In Runge's painting we are clearly dealing with the attempt to present contemporary philosophy in art." He wrote an influential volume on color theory in 1808, Sphere of Colors, that was published the same year he died.
The Hamburger Kunsthalle is the art museum of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Germany. It is one of the largest art museums in the country. It consists of three connected buildings, dating from 1869, 1921 (Kuppelsaal) and 1997, located in the Altstadt district between the Hauptbahnhof and the two Alster lakes.
Three famous paintings were stolen from the Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt in 1994. Two thieves and a dealer were caught and sentenced to prison, but the people who had ordered the theft were never brought to justice. This case of art theft is unique in that the paintings were recovered by buying them back from the people behind the theft, resulting in a heavy profit for the Tate Gallery, owner of two of the paintings.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is a painting by German Romanticist artist Caspar David Friedrich made in 1818. It depicts a man standing upon a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer; he is gazing out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog through which other ridges, trees, and mountains pierce, which stretches out into the distance indefinitely.
Gotthard Graubner was a German painter, born in Erlbach, in Saxony, Germany.
Chalk Cliffs on Rügen is an oil painting of circa 1818 by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.
The Abbey in the Oakwood is an oil painting by Caspar David Friedrich. It was painted between 1809 and 1810 in Dresden and was first shown together with the painting The Monk by the Sea in the Prussian Academy of Arts exhibition of 1810. On Friedrich's request The Abbey in the Oakwood was hung beneath The Monk by the Sea. This painting is one of over two dozen of Friedrich's works that include cemeteries or graves.
The Sea of Ice, (1823–1824), is an oil painting that depicts a shipwreck in the Arctic by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Before 1826 this painting was known as The Polar Sea.
The Staatliche Kunsthalle is an art museum in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Joseph Leo Koerner is an American art historian and filmmaker. He is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Since 2008 he has also been Senior Fellow at the Harvard's Society of Fellows.
Cairn in Snow, also known as Dolmen in the snow, is a landscape painting by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich is noted for his landscapes depicting features such as trees or Gothic ruins, silhouetted against the sky or in morning mists. The painting depicts leafless trees in the winter snow, with the tops of two of the trees broken off and the third bent by the prevailing wind, giving the work a haunted, spectral air. It is a Romantic allegorical landscape, depicting a stone cairn or dolmen set amid three oak trees on a hilltop, with a contemplative melancholy mood. It was probably painted around 1807, making it among Friedrich's first oil paintings. It measures 61 by 80 centimetres and has been held by the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden since 1905.
Werner Hofmann was an Austrian art historian, cultural journalist, writer, curator and museum director, who is "considered by his colleagues as one of the most distinguished European scholars of modern art and its ideology."
Evening is an 1821 oil on canvas painting by Caspar David Friedrich, now in the Niedersächsischen Landesmuseum Hannover. With Morning, Midday and Afternoon, it forms a series on different times of day.
River Bank in Fog is a c. 1821 oil on canvas painting by Caspar David Friedrich, now in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne, for which it was acquired in 1942 from the Graf Hahn collection at Schloss Basedow (Mecklenburg). It is also known as Elbschiff in Early Fog.
Neubrandenburg or Neubrandenburg in the Morning Mist is an oil on canvas painting by Caspar David Friedrich, executed c. 1816, now in the Pommersches Landesmuseum in Griefswald. The artist's parents were both born in Neubrandenburg and he often painted it - another example is Neubrandenburg Burning.
The Tombs of the Old Heroes is an oil on canvas painting by Caspar David Friedrich, painted between April and August 1812. It is also known as The Graves of the Fallen Freedom Fighters or Arminius's Grave and is now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Jens Christian Jensen was a German art historian and curator.
Boy Sleeping on a Grave is a c. 1803 print designed by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, and printed on paper as a woodcut, the block cut by his brother Christian Friedrich, who was a carpenter and furniture maker.
