Caspar David Friedrich

Born

September 5, 1774

Died

May 7, 1840 (aged 65)

Known as

painter, sculptor, architectural drafter, watercolorist, printmaker, draftsperson

Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic, and anti-classical work, conveys a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings often set contemplative human figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. Art historian Christopher John Murray described their presence, in diminished perspective, amid expansive landscapes, as reducing the figures to a scale that directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

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