ITP 89: Winter Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich
In anticipation of the New Year, this week’s work of art is Winter Landscape by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich: a picture intended to prompt sombre reflections on the crossing of thresholds and the long journey of life. It was painted in 1811.
“Despite what many artists believe, art is not and should not be merely a skill,” Friedrich declared. “It should actually be completely and utterly the language of our feelings, our frame of mind; indeed, even of our devotion and our prayers.” Winter Landscape was an early attempt to put such ideas into practice. A small work, but conceived with great ambition, it is one of the first examples of a new genre pioneered by Friedrich: the devotional painting in which primacy has been given to the depiction of a grand and awe-inspiring landscape, as if to suggest that it is above all to nature that we must turn to find the grace of God.
On a bleak and snow-filled plain, a crippled traveller has cast aside his crutches to rest before a wayside crucifix set up in a stand of fir trees. Leaning against a boulder – the rock of faith – he clasps his hands together in prayer and gazes up worshipfully at the carved figure of Christ on the cross. In the misty distance a great Gothic cathedral looms in silhouette, as ethereal as a vision. Its form rhymes with that of the carefully composed arrangement of firs, reinforcing the point that nature is God’s cathedral too.
In Friedrich’s work, religious feeling and the experience of landscape seem so inextricably interwoven that it is difficult to say whether the church has been designed to make the trees seem charged with holiness, or whether it is the other way round. This ambiguity appears to have troubled some of Friedrich’s contemporaries, notably the connoisseur Friedrich von Ramdohr, who wrote a much-publicised attack on the artist questioning whether it was “a happy idea to use landscape for the allegorizing of a particular religious idea, or even for the purpose of awakening devotional feelings.” Friedrich replied that “with Jesus’s teaching the old world died… the sun sank and the earth could no longer grasp the departing light… the cross is unshakably firm like our faith… the fir-trees stand, evergreen, like the hopes of man in Him, the Crucified.”
The painter’s contemporary, Carl Gustav Carus, described him as a priest of the brush whose studio was as simple and spartan as a monastic cell. Friedrich had been brought up as a Lutheran, which partly explains the depth of his belief in nature as a second bible, God’s truest book. Such ideas, which were deeply rooted in his Protestant heritage, had also been taken up with renewed fervour by Friedrich’s contemporaries, notably the poet and theologian Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten. In his open-air sermons, delivered on the seashore near Altenkirchen on Rugen, Kosegarten preached a form of pantheistic Christianity, interpreting natural phenomena as forms of divine revelation. Friedrich was profoundly influenced by Kosegarten, and his pictures can be seen as attempts to translate such nature sermons into the language of oil paint.
Similar ideas infiltrated England at around the same time. The early poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, so strongly motivated by the desire to find God in the landscape, was also shaped by the philosophical pantheism of German writers, principally Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder. So there is a direct connection between Wordsworth’s “clouds of glory” and Friedrich’s mystical freezing vapours, which veil but also transfigure the world of solid objects, melting outlines and making everything seem to tremble with transcendental possibility.
The painter’s techniques eloquently express the different forms of spiritual yearning he felt. His draughtsmanship is extremely precise and linear. He draws the cathedral and the fir trees as if he were tracing the exact crystalline structure of a snowflake. The beauty of the tree discloses the beauty of the Divine Plan. Here, God is in the detail. But Friedrich is also drawn to the exact opposite of clarity and linearity. He is an ingenious painter of fogs and mists, the inventor of an unusual stippling technique designed to abolish line and create, instead, a close-toned painterly haze. This is done to furnish a sense of religious mystery, to recreate the experience of gazing out across some vast expanse of mistily indistinct space.
That experience was certainly very much part of Friedrich’s own youth. He was born in the harbour town of Greifswald on the Baltic coastline of Pomerania. The sense of living on a threshold, at a place where land meets sea, left a deep mark on his sensibility. The traveller in Winter Landscape is on the threshold of something too. The sea of mist, and the huge silhouetted cathedral at its heart, seem to beckon him. He will not walk there. He has, after all, discarded his crutches, leaving them scattered carelessly behind him in the manner of someone who knows he has no further use for them. We are possibly meant to think that the sight of the distant cathedral has effected a miracle cure, although I prefer a different explanation. The traveller has taken his last step, but redemption is at hand. His body has finished its long, halting journey, and now his soul will travel on to the mist-shrouded cathedral in the distance. At the moment of death, his spiritual homecoming will be complete.
However we choose to read it, I think there is something a little forced about Friedrich’s allegory, as if he is telling himself a story he wants terribly badly to believe – but about which he may secretly harbour doubts. At the age of 13 he had been involved in a skating accident. A younger brother had come to his help. Friedrich had been saved, but his brother died – “swallowed up by the depths before his very eyes”, in the words of the painter’s friend Carus. Dreaming his dreams of salvation was perhaps, in part, Friedrich’s way of trying to distance himself from the trauma of that moment. In painting, if not in reality, things could be made better. The ground in his Winter Landscape is covered with snow, but green shoots of grass push through, hinting at new life emerging from death.
Date: 31-12-2001
Owning Institution: The National Gallery, London.
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
19th Century
In anticipation of the New Year, this week’s work of art is Winter Landscape by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich: a picture intended to prompt sombre reflections on the crossing of thresholds and the long journey of life. It was painted in 1811.“Despite what many artists believe, art is not and should not be merely a skill,” Friedrich declared. “It should actually be completely and utterly the language of our feelings, our frame of mind; indeed, even of our devotion and our prayers.” Winter Landscape was an early attempt to put such ideas into practice. A small work, but conceived with great ambition, it is one of the first examples of a new genre pioneered by Friedrich: the devotional painting in which primacy has been given to the depiction of a grand and awe-inspiring landscape, as if to suggest that it is above all to nature that we must turn to find the grace of God.
On a bleak and snow-filled plain, a crippled traveller has cast aside his crutches to rest before a wayside crucifix set up in a stand of fir trees. Leaning against a boulder – the rock of faith – he clasps his hands together in prayer and gazes up worshipfully at the carved figure of Christ on the cross. In the misty distance a great Gothic cathedral looms in silhouette, as ethereal as a vision. Its form rhymes with that of the carefully composed arrangement of firs, reinforcing the point that nature is God’s cathedral too.
In Friedrich’s work, religious feeling and the experience of landscape seem so inextricably interwoven that it is difficult to say whether the church has been designed to make the trees seem charged with holiness, or whether it is the other way round. This ambiguity appears to have troubled some of Friedrich’s contemporaries, notably the connoisseur Friedrich von Ramdohr, who wrote a much-publicised attack on the artist questioning whether it was “a happy idea to use landscape for the allegorizing of a particular religious idea, or even for the purpose of awakening devotional feelings.” Friedrich replied that “with Jesus’s teaching the old world died… the sun sank and the earth could no longer grasp the departing light… the cross is unshakably firm like our faith… the fir-trees stand, evergreen, like the hopes of man in Him, the Crucified.”
The painter’s contemporary, Carl Gustav Carus, described him as a priest of the brush whose studio was as simple and spartan as a monastic cell. Friedrich had been brought up as a Lutheran, which partly explains the depth of his belief in nature as a second bible, God’s truest book. Such ideas, which were deeply rooted in his Protestant heritage, had also been taken up with renewed fervour by Friedrich’s contemporaries, notably the poet and theologian Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten. In his open-air sermons, delivered on the seashore near Altenkirchen on Rugen, Kosegarten preached a form of pantheistic Christianity, interpreting natural phenomena as forms of divine revelation. Friedrich was profoundly influenced by Kosegarten, and his pictures can be seen as attempts to translate such nature sermons into the language of oil paint.
Similar ideas infiltrated England at around the same time. The early poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, so strongly motivated by the desire to find God in the landscape, was also shaped by the philosophical pantheism of German writers, principally Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder. So there is a direct connection between Wordsworth’s “clouds of glory” and Friedrich’s mystical freezing vapours, which veil but also transfigure the world of solid objects, melting outlines and making everything seem to tremble with transcendental possibility.
The painter’s techniques eloquently express the different forms of spiritual yearning he felt. His draughtsmanship is extremely precise and linear. He draws the cathedral and the fir trees as if he were tracing the exact crystalline structure of a snowflake. The beauty of the tree discloses the beauty of the Divine Plan. Here, God is in the detail. But Friedrich is also drawn to the exact opposite of clarity and linearity. He is an ingenious painter of fogs and mists, the inventor of an unusual stippling technique designed to abolish line and create, instead, a close-toned painterly haze. This is done to furnish a sense of religious mystery, to recreate the experience of gazing out across some vast expanse of mistily indistinct space.
That experience was certainly very much part of Friedrich’s own youth. He was born in the harbour town of Greifswald on the Baltic coastline of Pomerania. The sense of living on a threshold, at a place where land meets sea, left a deep mark on his sensibility. The traveller in Winter Landscape is on the threshold of something too. The sea of mist, and the huge silhouetted cathedral at its heart, seem to beckon him. He will not walk there. He has, after all, discarded his crutches, leaving them scattered carelessly behind him in the manner of someone who knows he has no further use for them. We are possibly meant to think that the sight of the distant cathedral has effected a miracle cure, although I prefer a different explanation. The traveller has taken his last step, but redemption is at hand. His body has finished its long, halting journey, and now his soul will travel on to the mist-shrouded cathedral in the distance. At the moment of death, his spiritual homecoming will be complete.
However we choose to read it, I think there is something a little forced about Friedrich’s allegory, as if he is telling himself a story he wants terribly badly to believe – but about which he may secretly harbour doubts. At the age of 13 he had been involved in a skating accident. A younger brother had come to his help. Friedrich had been saved, but his brother died – “swallowed up by the depths before his very eyes”, in the words of the painter’s friend Carus. Dreaming his dreams of salvation was perhaps, in part, Friedrich’s way of trying to distance himself from the trauma of that moment. In painting, if not in reality, things could be made better. The ground in his Winter Landscape is covered with snow, but green shoots of grass push through, hinting at new life emerging from death.
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