Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

• Was a German Romantic landscape painter.
• Friedrich was born in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in Swedish Pomerania.
• The sixth of ten children, he was raised in the strict Lutheran creed.
• He studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden.
• Friedrich's work brought him renown early in his career.
• Contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d'Angers spoke of him as having discovered "the tragedy of landscape".
• The rise of Nazism in the early 1930s saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, seen as promoting German nationalism.
• In the late 1970s Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement.
• The displayed painting is a crop from: Gerhard von Kügelgen, The Painter Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1808.
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