Caspar David Friedrich Quotes
A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling.
Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore, editor. From the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century. Yale University Press, 1981, p. 119.
Caspar David Friedrich 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 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".
