Romancing the ideal and the real

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) - Casper David Friedrich

Art-making is an exploration of the real and the ideal. These perceptions of ideal and real are rooted in the prevailing realities of each historical period and the personal experiences of the artist.

Romanticism is a period of artistic expression that highlights the interplay between changing political, theological, and economic realities in the artist's personal life and creative process. This interplay gave rise to new ways of seeing and representing the world and our beliefs, with a heightened appreciation for nature, emotion, beauty, and the individual’s relationship with the Divine.

With the emergence in late 18th-century Europe of Romanticism alongside the rise of the modern individual, artistic work became a process of individual expression and evocation with the natural world as a primary subject.

Romanticism gave rise to many successive artistic movements that placed personal experience and vision at the center of artistic process and elevated idealized representations of the natural world as a primary subject for artistry.

The Protestant rejection of the authority of the Catholic Pope, a couple hundred years of warfare contesting that rejection, an increasingly industrial global economy bringing wealth and growing urban centers and the Enlightenment, together made possible a conception of the individual as a rational being, able to think and see and know the world without the confines of ancient traditions. Scientific experimentation, engineering, mechanized business, and literacy enabled these new notions of humanity. Enthusiasm for man’s creative potential energized industry and political dialogue. Utopianist visions of man’s potential would emerge to find many willing followers.

With this new focus on reason as a means to progress, the true and good, Romanticism, an artistic movement, emerged to provide balance, focusing on the human emotional connection with nature, God, and self.

Key artists of Romanticism include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Dumas, Casper David Friedrich, JMW Turner, John Constable, Goya, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms.

As a landscape photographer, the work of J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and Casper David Friedrich loom large as exemplars of artists representing the majesty of the natural world mediated through personal intuitive experience.

The paintings of Casper David Friedrich in particular highlight the connection between man and the immensity of nature. Friedrichs paintings are powerful meditations on the landscape and man’s experience of himself within the landscape.

His careful study of the elements of nature through outdoor drawing excursions and travel throughout the German countryside was the workshop for his ideas. Rocks, trees, cathedral ruins, clouds, these sketchings would be worked into well-planned paintings. Starting out as a draftsman, drawing was the foundation of Friedrich’s artistic practice.

Friedrich’s paintings are often spooky, dark, with bare trees, protruding rocks, cemeteries, gravesites, ruins, subdued colors, lone figures gazing with backs turned to the viewer, sunsets, sunrises, moons lit scenes, all intentionally evoking a range of emotions.

The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808–1810)

“I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full, I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensable for my dialogue with nature.”

Casper David Friedrich

He sought to experience and represent moments of high contrast that spoke to the raw power of the natural world. Awe, excitement, tranquility, transfixion are communicated through human figures within large-scale scenes. The human figures are caught up within and captured by the beauty and the powerful forces of the natural world.

Friedrich’s depictions of nature are no celebration of the human triumph over nature, but rather a recognition of nature’s awesome power over humanity with atmospheric melancholic tones, reminding viewers of our mortality.

Cemetery Entrance

The focus on landscapes and nature with human figures facing away from the viewer ran counter to established artistic trends.

Prior artists used landscape as a background to dramatic human subjects. For Friedrich, the landscape becomes the primary subject, and the humans within his compositions are subject to the grandeur of the natural world.

This departure was a radical one born of a commitment to personal expression and the desire to express personal emotions. His theological foundations were formed by theologian Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who taught that God reveals himself through nature.

“The painter should not just paint what he sees in front of him but also he sees within himself.”

Casper David Friedrich

This idea would become foundational for successive artistic movements. Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism Mannerism, Art Nouveau and many others all share a common root in this idea of individual emotion and expression as starting point for artistic creation.

For many landscape photographers as well, inner experience of external reality is the story to be told. And much of today’s photography of grand landscapes is directly inspired by Friedrich.

Friedrich expanded the subject matter artists explored. Landscapes were a micro niche within classical artworks. Biblical stories, the drama of political moments, historical figures, the nobility, were largely rejected as subjects by Friedrich, replaced by mountain scenes, ruins, beaches and countryside.

This new focus beyond the traditional subject matter expanded the possibilities for future visual artists.

His commitment was to the personal experience of the transcendent universals of beauty and power of nature and expressing that through his art.

Friedrichs work is an excellent example of an artist dedicated to pursuing a personal vision, aligned with his core beliefs about God, man and nature, aligned with personal intuition and masterful grasp of craft.