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Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon
Caspar David Friedricharound 1824
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Berlin, Germany
Pausing on their nocturnal walk through a mountain forest is a couple on a rise beside a dramatically contorted, uprooted oak. Darkness envelops the strollers; their eyes are raised to the reassuring celestial light of the moon that permeates the atmosphere with a solemn stillness. Deep in the moonlit night the trees and rocks acquire strange, almost eerie, dimensions and importance. The two figures are united by their shared experience of the natural world confronting them with an awareness of their transience; together they face the mystery of the unfathomable. The date of origin of this painting is disputed; various dates between 1818 and 1835 have been proposed.
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Details
- Title: Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon
- Creator: Caspar David Friedrich
- Date Created: around 1824
- Physical Dimensions: w44.0 x h34.0 cm
- Type: Painting
- Technique and material: Oil on canvas
- Inv.-No.: A II 887
- ISIL-No.: DE-MUS-815114
- External link: Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
- Copyrights: Text: © Prestel Verlag / Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Photo: © b p k - Photo Agency / Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders
- Collection: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Acquired 1935
- Artist biography: Caspar David Friedrich was the most important German painter and draughtsman of the early Romantic period. He started his artistic training in 1790 when he became a private student of Johann Gottfried Quistorp in Greifswald. In 1794 he entered the Academy of Copenhagen where he formed his style copying antique sculptures. During this period he served as an apprentice under Christian August Lorentzen and Jens Juel. These artists were exponents of the Sturm und Drang movement which was characterized by individual subjectivity and heightened emotionality. Friedrich settled in Dresden, where he worked in printmaking with etchings and layouts for woodcuts, later turning to watercolours, ink and sepias. From 1801 he made frequent trips to the Baltic coast and various German mountains, drawing inspiration for a number of landscape paintings which soon became his favourite subject. Friedrich won a competition, set up by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar in 1805, with his sepia drawings 'Procession at Dawn' and 'Fisher-Folk by the Sea'. He also gained recognition for being the first artist to depict a landscape in an altarpiece, with 'The Cross in the Mountains' (1807) becoming one of his most important artworks. In 1810 he was appointed a member of the Berlin Academy. He was held in high esteem even as far away as Russia, by the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich and the tutor to Alexander II, Vasily Zhukovsky, who supported him by purchasing works himself and recommending him to other nobles. Friedrich’s prestige decreased over the last years of his life when he lived in relative poverty, making him dependent on the charity of friends. Among them were a number of important artists such as Philipp Otto Runge, Georg Friedrich Kersting and Christian Dahl. Friedrich’s compositions are characterized by metaphysical transcendence. His main subjects were landscapes and he forged a new way of depicting nature: often using a ‘back figure’, whereby a figure contemplating the view is seen from behind. His landscapes widely present religious topics, while his winter landscapes show a raw and powerful side to nature of a kind never depicted before. It is purely thanks to Friedrich and other Romantic painters that the genre of landscape painting holds such an important status within Western art as a whole. Among his most famous works are 'The Wanderer above the Mists' (1818), 'Chalk Cliffs on Rügen' (1818), 'The Abbey in the Oakwood' (1808–10) and 'Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon' (1830–35).
- Artist Place of Death: Dresden, Germany
- Artist Place of Birth: Greifswald, Germany
- Artist Dates: 1774-09-05/1840-05-07
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