Caspar David Friedrich Oil Painting Hand Painted Art Reproduction Museum Quality Canvas

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

Though born in Pomerania on the Baltic, Caspar David Friedrich was raised in Dresden, Germany, where he had a strict, Protestant upbringing. He belonged to the early nineteenth-century artistic movement called Romanticism which involved nature, nationalism and spirituality. His art was a perfect expression of this movement. Today, Friedrich is recognized as the classic Romantic painter. In his paintings Friedrich rarely draws people, except to emphasise nature's immensity. When figures appear in Caspar David Friedrich oil paintings, they stand with their backs to the viewer, lost in thought. Friedrich is primarily a spiritual artist. His worship of nature finds expression in Caspar David Friedrich paintings and symbolizes the artist’s protestant faith.

Some of Friedrich's best-known paintings are expressions of a religious mysticism. In 1808 he exhibited one of his most controversial paintings, “The Cross in the Mountains”, in which--for the first time in Christian art--an altarpiece was conceived in terms of a pure landscape. The cross, viewed obliquely from behind, is an insignificant element in the composition. More important are the dominant rays of the evening sun, which the artist said depicted the setting of the old, pre-Christian world. The mountain symbolizes an immovable faith, while the fir trees are an allegory of hope. Friedrich painted several other important compositions in which crosses dominate the background.

After studying in Copenhagen, Friedrich left his home, Greifswald, for Dresden, the art capital of Europe in the nineteenth century. He specialised in sepia, watercolours, and topographical drawings, turning to oils by 1808. In 1825, Friedrich suffered a severe illness from which he never fully recovered. A decade later, a stroke caused him to turn to watercolors and sepias of his youth because he was too weak to paint oils. Friedrich died on the 7th of May 1840, a bitter, impoverished and an unknown man in the art world.