It will feature over 200 exhibits from fifteen Russian museums: paintings, graphic works, applied art, archival documents and memorial objects. This is the first time that the works by the artist kept in Russian collections are being exhibited so fully in one common space: eleven of his paintings and sixteen of his drawings have been brought together.

“Friedrich is the pride of Germany and the pride of the Hermitage. Our collection is not only exceptionally good, but also wrapped up in the romantic tale of Russian love of Friedrich, the images of Nicholas I, Alexandra Feodorovna and Zhukovsky,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the Hermitage, says. “This whole story is a particular example of the elaborate connections between Russian culture and the culture of Europe.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) is one of the most significant representatives of German Romanticism. He succeeded in embodying and developing in figurative art the principles that before him had been formulated in literature and philosophical treatises by Friedrich Schiller and Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Not all the painter’s contemporaries, however, were able to grasp his innovative art, and while the artist was still living keen interest in his pictures gave way to forgetful disregard.

Caspar David Friedrich would find his most significant devotees and clientele in Russia. The idea of the exhibition lies in presenting his works in the context of Russian cultural life in the first half of the 19th century. The display tells visitors about the artist himself, about how his works appeared in the Russian Empire, about the main Russian collectors of his output – Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, as well as the reverberations of Friedrich’s oeuvre in the works of Russian artists.

The exhibition curators are Mikhail Dedinkin, head of the Department of Western European Fine Art, and Alexandra Konshakova, a researcher in that department.

The exhibition can be visited by all holders of entrance tickets to the Hermitage’s Main Museum Complex.

* * *

More about the exhibition Caspar David Friedrich is the artist who most fully expressed the ideals of German Romanticism in painting. In his works, the literati and philosophers of the day found reflection of the most elevated conceptions of art, while 20th-century creators discovered an enormous potential for avant-garde artistic explorations.

The main theme of Friedrich’s oeuvre was landscape. It was a genre that held particular significance for the are of Romanticism, which found in wild, primaeval nature and ideal of purity and freedom. Having grown up on the shores of the Baltic Sea, from his youth onwards Caspar David Friedrich delighted in its boundless expanses and the mysterious light of the northern sky. Later, in the years spent wandering in the highlands of Bohemia and Saxony, he turned to soul-lifting images of mountain peaks and bottomless chasms.

The artist emphasized the importance of depicting northern, German landscapes, decrying those who were only willing to find beauty in the abundant countryside of Italy. At the same time, Friedrich’s pictures never reproduce a specific landscape exactly. They are a composite image of the world created in the painter’s imagination. In the German Romantic’s works, the eternal and the momentary clash in an insoluble contradiction, in which colossal nature is juxtaposed to the fragile world of the human being.

Russian museums are home to a unique collection of Friedrich’s works, the largest outside of Germany itself. Since this collection was formed mainly through purchases by the imperial family and the paintings originally adorned imperial country seats outside Saint Petersburg (the Cottage in Peterhof, the Znamenka and Ropsha estates), the best place to hold a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s works is the main imperial residence.

The exhibition “Landscape of the Soul. Caspar David Friedrich and Russia” is made up of four sections. The central one presents paintings and drawings by Friedrich himself. Those include:

On a Sailing Ship – a metaphorical self-portrait of the artist and his wife that was probably a gift from Emperor Nicholas I to his own young spouse, Alexandra Feodorovna A unique painted portrait of Vasily Zhukovsky and his friends, the Turgenev brothers, Sergei and Alexander Sepia drawings that are works of rare quality, wholly comparable to his painted compositions, but are hardly ever exhibited. The three other sections tell about Russian admirers of Friedrich’s talent and about how his oeuvre influences the evolution of the Romantic tendency in Russian art.

The first is devoted to Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky – a poet, artist, art collector and popularizer of the Romantic world-view and of Friedrich’s talent; the second to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, her fascination with the Middle Ages, which was shared by Emperor Nicholas I and their children, as well as her art collection. The third presents works by Russian artists that conveyed a Romantic view of the landscapes of the Russian Empire. Taken together, they make it possible to trace how knowledge about Caspar David Friedrich spread in the Russian intellectual milieu and how Russian society assimilated the principles of the Romantic landscape.

Exhibits include:

Drawings made by Zhukovsky during his travels around the Crimea, the Alps and Italy that are almost unknown to the general public Original inventories of the collections of Zhukovskyand Alexandra Feodorovna Letters from Friedrich to Zhukovsky An album containing Zhukovsky’s admonitions to Tsesarevich Alexander Nikolayevich (the future Alexander II), whose tutor and mentor the poet was Two views of the Caucasus painted by the writer Mikhail Lermontov Also on show are collections of depictions of mediaeval costumes, which were popular in the 19th century, furniture, stage scenery and architectural designs in a Gothic spirit. All of this presents the context of the cultural life of the Russian Empire into which Friedrich’s masterpieces fitted organically.

Particular attention is due to the story and personality of Princess Charlotte of Prussia, who went on to become Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. The exhibition includes an album that she brought from Germany and a Gothic table service from the Cottage, the palace constructed for her in the park at Peterhof named Alexandria. For the first time, the focus is on the composition and specific character of the Empress’s art collection. Discoveries made in the course of preparing the exhibition show how Alexandra Feodorovna’s personality influenced the development of Romanticism in Russia and the formation of the aristocracy’s artistic tastes.

The architectural design of the exhibition presents the great artist’s works as an integral group, unique of its kind, that demonstrates various aspects of his oeuvre. The Russian context surrounds them and is inseparably bound up above all with the image of the Winter Palace, the life and interests of its occupants. In this part of the display, visitors can see works from the imperial collections and items that tell about the life of Vasily Zhukovsky. It was in his court apartment that Russian men of letters and artists became acquainted with Friedrich’s oeuvre, and he was the person who acted as an intermediary connecting German and Russian artistic culture.

The exhibition has been organized by the State Hermitage with the participation of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, State Tretyakov Gallery, State Pushkin Museum, All-Russian Pushkin Museum, RAS Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), National Library of Russia, State Russian Museum, Gatchina, Pavlovsk and Peterhof State Museum-Preserves, Novgorod Museum-Preserve, Radishchev State Art Museum in Saratov, Tambov Regional Picture Gallery and Tarkhany State Lermontov Museum-Preserve.

The exhibition has been prepared by the Department of Western European Fine Art (headed by Mikhail Dedinkin), Department of Western European Applied Art (headed by Olga Kostiuk), Department of the History of Russian Culture (headed by Viacheslav Feodorov), the Research Library (headed by Yevgeny Platonov) and Research Archive of Manuscripts and the Document Fund (headed by Yelizaveta Yakovleva).

The project coordinator is Svetlana Datsenko, adviser to the General Director of the Hermitage.

The architect of the exhibition is Maxim Atayants.

* * *

Towards the end of his life, Friedrich is known to have produced “transparent” paintings on a support that allowed light to pass through. Specially for the exhibition in the Hermitage, students of the Saint Petersburg Repin Academy of Arts have reconstructed these lost works by the artist on the basis of sketches and descriptions.

As part of the “Musical Dimension” project, the idea for which comes from the musicAeterna team, the musicAeterna residents have selected compositions to accompany eleven art works and three reconstructions featured in the exhibition. The labels for those works will include a QR code which visitors can scan in order to listen to the chosen piece of music. Additionally, on 8 and 9 December, two concerts devoted to the exhibition “Landscape of the Soul. Caspar David Friedrich and Russia” will take place in the Hermitage.

The musical accompaniment to the exhibition is Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler performed by an Honoured Ensemble of Russia, the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the D.D. Shostakovich Saint Petersburg Academic Philharmonia, conducted by Nikolai Alexeyev.