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Caaspar David Friedrich Early Life

Decent Essays

In the beginning period of Romanticism, subjectivity and intuition began to emerge and the movement started to affect people's ideas. Caspar David Friedrich's artwork was essential to intensifying and really dissecting the idea of what Romanticism was. It gave a different light to natural philosophy as well as pushing the boundaries to the subject work of art.

Up until the Romantic period the subject matter of art was that of neoclassical, a feel of personal integrity and nobility of character. The Romantic period gave way to the ideals of chaos and extreme emotions. Friedrich was born into this time and thus a new era was born unto him. Looking at, “View of the Artist's Studio, Left Window-1805/06-Sepia.”1 This was before he transitioned …show more content…

His life gave way to hardships which directly influenced his particular painting form and subject matter. Friedrich's early life was filled with death. His mother died when he was seven, two of his sisters died in their childhood and what scarred Friedrich the most was that his brother perished saving him from a frozen pond causing him multitudes of guilt.5 Romanticism included the most extremes of emotion, both joyous and depressing, this gave him an outlet for which Friedrich produced pieces with much melancholy. It was only a few years after he began to use oils that he adopted this style. It is seen very plainly in the piece “Abbey In the Oak Forest-1809/10-Oil” and its companion piece “Monk By The Sea-1808/10-Oil.”6 These two pieces were created only a year after Friedrich's father dies in 1809; the dark color scheme and dismal atmosphere of both these paintings are reminiscent of the sadness he feels after most everyone of his family has died. After this, his paintings stay mostly consistent with this feeling and are inconsistent with the aura of the time; this confused and enraged some people, they believed his depiction was just plain wrong. They were still used to the ideology of neoclassicism where everything was shown just as it was; Friedrich was taking his own ideas into account and making his work take a sharp left turn into a realm no one had ever seen …show more content…

People started to get curious of the world around them and started to investigate, including Friedrich. There was a part of him conditioned to paint nature due to the fact that when he attended the Academy of Copenhagen for school, “Friedrich was taught by the very best Danish artists, including Christian August Lorentzen (a landscape painter), Jens Juel (a portrait and landscape painter) and Nicolai Abildgaard (a history painter).”7 Although this gave him the basic knowledge of traditional landscape painting, it was truly the new found mysteries of lands unexplored that drew him and made his paintings passionately vivid. The intensity he had is easy to see in he painting, “The Polar Sea-1823/24-Oil”8 with large chunks of ice splintering over each other in a tangled mass with the wreckage of a ship visible. It was deemed by the king of Prussia that, “No doubt the great ice of the North doesn't look like this.”9 The way Friedrich saw the idea of natural philosophy and the search for knowledge was in a darker tone than most others thought. He saw lost expeditions and lives destroyed in a sea of ice; he gave way to the other side of this hopeful new era which was dark and truthful, the side that no one wanted to think

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