Caspar David Friedrich

Every post here is by Caspar David Friedrich.

Erisava Staff Jul 29

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Hamburger Kunsthalle · wikidata.org

Public domain

No one seems fully sure who the man is supposed to be — some accounts say a friend, others think he's simply invented to give the scene someone to stand in for. Paintings like this get filed under Romanticism, when nature itself started getting treated as something close to religious.

Erisava Staff Jul 24

Two men contemplating the Moon by Caspar David Friedrich, 1819

Two men contemplating the Moon

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden · wikidata.org

Public domain

He painted this same set-up at least three times, from what I can find, swapping a woman in for one of the men in a later go. There's a story that he looked at the two of them in their old-fashioned German coats and said they were up to demagogic intrigues — supposedly a joke about how that kind of dress had become politically suspect to the authorities at the time.