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Friedrich's written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of aphorisms set down in 1830, in which he explained the need for the artist to match natural observation with an introspective scrutiny of his own personality. His best-known remark advises the artist to "close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards." |
Loneliness and death |
Both Friedrich's life and art have at times been perceived by some to have been marked with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute such interpretations to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, while Friedrich's pale and withdrawn appearance helped reinforce the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North". |
Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c. 1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826. There are noticeable thematic shifts in the works he produced during these episodes, which see the emergence of such motifs and symbols as vultures, owls, graveyards and ruins. From 1826 these motifs became a permanent feature of his output, while his use of colour became more dark and muted. Carus wrote in 1829 that Friedrich "is surrounded by a thick, gloomy cloud of spiritual uncertainty", though the noted art historian and curator Hubertus Gassner disagrees with such notions, seeing in Friedrich's work a positive and life-affirming subtext inspired by Freemasonry and religion. |
Germanic folklore |
Reflecting Friedrich's patriotism and resentment during the 1813 French occupation of the dominion of Pomerania, motifs from German folklore became increasingly prominent in his work. An anti-French German nationalist, Friedrich used motifs from his native landscape to celebrate Germanic culture, customs and mythology. He was impressed by the anti-Napoleonic poetry of Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner, and the patriotic literature of Adam Müller and Heinrich von Kleist. Moved by the deaths of three friends killed in battle against France, as well as by Kleist's 1808 drama Die Hermannsschlacht, Friedrich undertook a number of paintings in which he intended to convey political symbols solely by means of the landscape—a first in the history of art. |
In Old Heroes' Graves (1812), a dilapidated monument inscribed "Arminius" invokes the Germanic chieftain, a symbol of nationalism, while the four tombs of fallen heroes are slightly ajar, freeing their spirits for eternity. Two French soldiers appear as small figures before a cave, lower and deep in a grotto surrounded by rock, as if farther from heaven. A second political painting, Fir Forest with the French Dragoon and the Raven (c. 1813), depicts a lost French soldier dwarfed by a dense forest, while on a tree stump a raven is perched—a prophet of doom, symbolizing the anticipated defeat of France. |
Legacy |
Influence |
Alongside other Romantic painters, Friedrich helped position landscape painting as a major genre within Western art. Of his contemporaries, Friedrich's style most influenced the painting of Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857). Among later generations, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was strongly influenced by his work, and the substantial presence of Friedrich's works in Russian collections influenced many Russian painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c. 1842–1910) and Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898). Friedrich's spirituality anticipated American painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919), the painters of the Hudson River School and the New England Luminists. |
At the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich was rediscovered by the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert (1851–1913), whose writing initiated modern Friedrich scholarship, and by the Symbolist painters, who valued his visionary and allegorical landscapes. The Norwegian Symbolist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) would have seen Friedrich's work during a visit to Berlin in the 1880s. Munch's 1899 print The Lonely Ones echoes Friedrich's Rückenfigur (back figure), although in Munch's work the focus has shifted away from the broad landscape and toward the sense of dislocation between the two melancholy figures in the foreground. |
Friedrich's modern revival gained momentum in 1906, when thirty-two of his works were featured in an exhibition in Berlin of Romantic-era art. His landscapes exercised a strong influence on the work of German artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), and as a result other Surrealists came to view Friedrich as a precursor to their movement. In 1934, the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967) paid tribute in his work The Human Condition, which directly echoes motifs from Friedrich's art in its questioning of perception and the role of the viewer. |
A few years later, the Surrealist journal Minotaure included Friedrich in a 1939 article by the critic Marie Landsberger, thereby exposing his work to a far wider circle of artists. The influence of The Wreck of Hope (or The Sea of Ice) is evident in the 1940–41 painting Totes Meer by Paul Nash (1889–1946), a fervent admirer of Ernst. Friedrich's work has been cited as an inspiration by other major 20th-century artists, including Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Gotthard Graubner and Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Friedrich's Romantic paintings have also been singled out by writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89), who, standing before Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, said "This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know." |
In his 1961 article "The Abstract Sublime", originally published in ARTnews, the art historian Robert Rosenblum drew comparisons between the Romantic landscape paintings of both Friedrich and Turner with the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. Rosenblum specifically describes Friedrich's 1809 painting The Monk by the Sea, Turner's The Evening Star and Rothko's 1954 Light, Earth and Blue as revealing affinities of vision and feeling. According to Rosenblum, "Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the aestheticians of the Sublime. The tiny monk in the Friedrich and the fisher in the Turner establish a poignant contrast between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic God and the infinite smallness of His creatures. In the abstract language of Rothko, such literal detail—a bridge of empathy between the real spectator and the presentation of a transcendental landscape—is no longer necessary; we ourselves are the monk before the sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures as if we were looking at a sunset or a moonlit night." |
Critical opinion |
Until 1890, and especially after his friends had died, Friedrich's work lay in near-oblivion for decades. Yet, by 1890, the symbolism in his work began to ring true with the artistic mood of the day, especially in central Europe. However, despite a renewed interest and an acknowledgment of his originality, his lack of regard for "painterly effect" and thinly rendered surfaces jarred with the theories of the time. |
During the 1930s, Friedrich's work was used in the promotion of Nazi ideology, which attempted to fit the Romantic artist within the nationalistic Blut und Boden. It took decades for Friedrich's reputation to recover from this association with Nazism. His reliance on symbolism and the fact that his work fell outside the narrow definitions of modernism contributed to his fall from favour. In 1949, art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Friedrich "worked in the frigid technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a school of modern painting", and suggested that the artist was trying to express in painting what is best left to poetry. Clark's dismissal of Friedrich reflected the damage the artist's reputation sustained during the late 1930s. |
Friedrich's reputation suffered further damage when his imagery was adopted by a number of Hollywood directors, including Walt Disney, built on the work of such German cinema masters as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, within the horror and fantasy genres. His rehabilitation was slow, but enhanced through the writings of such critics and scholars as Werner Hofmann, Helmut Börsch-Supan and Sigrid Hinz, who successfully rebutted the political associations ascribed to his work, developed a catalogue raisonné, and placed Friedrich within a purely art-historical context. |
By the 1970s, he was again being exhibited in major international galleries and found favour with a new generation of critics and art historians. Today, his international reputation is well established. He is a national icon in his native Germany, and highly regarded by art historians and connoisseurs across the Western World. He is generally viewed as a figure of great psychological complexity, and according to Vaughan, "a believer who struggled with doubt, a celebrator of beauty haunted by darkness. In the end, he transcends interpretation, reaching across cultures through the compelling appeal of his imagery. He has truly emerged as a butterfly—hopefully one that will never again disappear from our sight". |
Work |
Friedrich was a prolific artist who produced more than 500 attributed works. In line with the Romantic ideals of his time, he intended his paintings to function as pure aesthetic statements, so he was cautious that the titles given to his work were not overly descriptive or evocative. It is likely that some of today's more literal titles, such as The Stages of Life, were not given by the artist himself, but were instead adopted during one of the revivals of interest in Friedrich. Complications arise when dating Friedrich's work, in part because he often did not directly name or date his canvases. He kept a carefully detailed notebook on his output, however, which has been used by scholars to tie paintings to their completion dates. |
Notes |
References |
Sources |
External links |
Hermitage Museum Archive |
CasparDavidFriedrich.org – 89 paintings by Caspar David Friedrich |
Biographical timeline, Hamburg Kunsthalle |
Caspar David Friedrich and the German romantic landscape |
German masters of the nineteenth century: paintings and drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany, full text exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on Caspar David Friedrich (no. 29–36) |
Charles Brooking (c.1723–59) was an English painter of marine scenes. |
Life |
It is highly probable that Brooking’s father was a Charles Brooking (1677–1738) who was recorded as employed by Greenwich Hospital (London) between 1729 and 1736 as a painter and decorator. Charles Brooking senior had earlier been active in Plymouth and Dublin where he is recorded as working on Trinity College Dublin in 1723-25. He also produced one of the earliest dedicated maps of Dublin which was published in London in 1728. |
On 27 November 1732 "Master Charles Brooking" was recorded as an apprentice, one of two taken on by Brooking senior on that date. |
An anecdote related by the marine artist Dominic Serres about Brooking is that he worked for a picture dealer in Leicester Square, London, who exploited him until his “discovery” by Taylor White, the Treasurer of the Foundling Hospital in London. |
Brooking became much more widely known in 1754, when as a result of his “discovery” he was commissioned by the Foundling Hospital to paint what is now titled A Flagship Before the Wind Under Easy Sail, following which he was elected a Governor and Guardian of the institution. This painting is a huge sea piece intended to "match" another painting, whereabouts unknown, said to be of a “Fleet in the Downs”, by Peter Monamy. |
It is claimed that Dominic Serres received some instruction for a short time from Brooking. It has also been suggested that Francis Swaine was another pupil, but the age difference between the two painters was a mere two years, and there is no visual evidence that Swaine followed Brooking’s manner. |
Brooking is said to have died of consumption on 25 March 1759, reportedly leaving his family destitute. |
Work |
Brooking's earliest known works are two pictures, one depicting a moonlit harbour scene and the other a burning ship, which he signed and inscribed with his age, 17, and thus datable to 1740. Since he was described as a "celebrated painter of sea-pieces" in 1752, when he worked for John Ellis (c.1710–76), he had evidently been producing work for at least 12 years before that date. The mention by Ellis occurs in his Natural History of the Corallines, published in London in 1755. Ellis employed Brooking as a botanical draughtsman. An example of earlier work by Brooking is his painting of an engagement between Commodore Walker and a fleet of French ships which occurred on 23 May 1745, which was engraved and published by Boydell in 1753. This painting is now in the Greenwich Maritime Museum. |
Except for paintings such as this, which record specific historical events, Brooking’s early works are not easy to date more precisely, other than stylistically and by theme, and have not yet been closely examined for their chronological development. His first two pictures show some influence of Peter Monamy, but he was already displaying strong signs of a distinctive personal manner. He soon drew away from the native traditions of the marine genre, which included formal ship portraiture, although there are at least two works signed by him, one now in the Maritime Museum at Greenwich, which portray a ship in this convention. There is also a group of paintings and prints, signed or inscribed "Monamy" and datable to the years circa 1745-1750, but whose style is more consistent with Brooking’s. Some of the identical prints occur with attributions by different print dealers to both painters in separate issues. |
Brooking’s accuracy and exceptionally careful attention to detail manifest his intimate knowledge of maritime practice and naval architecture, as well as his remarkably close observation of the ocean conditions of wave and wind. Contemporary accounts suggest that he had been “much at sea” and he certainly owned a small yacht. In his early years he was evidently employed in some maritime capacity, possibly in a pilot boat at Gravesend. Some of his presumed later works plainly show the influence of Willem van de Velde the Younger. |
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London holds 23 of his oil paintings, a complete set of 28 engravings after his works, and 4 drawings bequeathed by the U.S. President, J.F.Kennedy. A plaque to Brooking was unveiled by the Lord Mayor of the City of London at Tokenhouse Yard in October, 2008. |
Notes |
Bibliography |
John Ellis. A Natural History of the Corallines (1755). |
Edward Edwards. Anecdotes of Painters (1808). |
Colin Sorensen. Charles Brooking 1723 -1759 (Aldeburgh and Bristol Exhibition Catalogue, 1966). |
Benedict Nicolson. The Treasures of the Foundling Hospital (OUP, 1972). |
David Joel & James Taylor. Charles Brooking (1723-59) and the 18th Century Marine Painters (Antique Collectors Club, 1999). ISBN 978-1-85149-277-0 |
David Joel. The Call of the Sea: Peter Monamy, Charles Brooking and the early British marine painters (catalogue for an exhibition mounted at the St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington, Hampshire, England, 13 August – 17 October 2009). ISBN 978-0-9559729-1-1 |
External links |
48 artworks by or after Charles Brooking at the Art UK site |
Charles Brooking online (ArtCyclopedia) |
The call of the sea (Exhibition of Brooking's work at the St. Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington - review by Andrew Graham Dixon) |
Brooking at the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich, London) |
Brooking at the Tate (paintings on display at London's Tate Gallery) |
A Royal Yacht Firing a Salute (painting) |
Shipping in a Calm (painting) |
Hutchinson, John (1892). "Charles Brooking" . Men of Kent and Kentishmen (Subscription ed.). Canterbury: Cross & Jackman. p. 24. |
Charles-Antoine Coypel (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl ɑ̃twan kwapɛl]; 11 July 1694 – 14 June 1752) was a French painter, art critic, and playwright. He became court painter to the French king and director of the Académie Royale. He inherited the title of Garde des tableaux et dessins du roi (Keeper of the paintings and drawings of the king), a function which combined the role of director and curator of the king's art collection. He was mainly active in Paris. |
Life |
Coypel was born in Paris on 11 July 1694 to a highly successful and influential family of history painters. His grandfather, Noël Coypel, had been Director of the French Academy in Rome as well as the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Antoine Coypel, Charles-Antoine's father, received numerous commissions from the French Royal Family, particularly Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. He would also become Director of the Académie Royale in 1714 and Premier Peintre du Roi the following year. Philippe Coypel (1703-1777), Antoine Coypel's second son, would become the King's valet de chambre. |
Coypel would live in the Louvre Palace for almost his entire life, beginning when he was three years old, when his father received a brevêt de logement (residence permit) in 1697. His family's quarters comprised at least fifteen rooms beneath the Grande Galerie as well as a three thousand square foot studio space, all of which Coypel would eventually inherit. |
Under the tutelage of his father, Coypel showed a genuine talent for painting early in life. He had the rare distinction of being named an agréé and subsequently an académicien by the Académie Royale on the same day in 1715 for his reception work Jason and Medea. Coypel was just twenty-one years old, but he had skipped the customary journey to Rome made by history painters, and perhaps more importantly, his father was Director at the time. |
He inherited his father’s design and painting duties as premier peintre to the Duke of Orléans when his father died in 1722. He became Premier Peintre du Roi and Director of the Académie Royale in 1747. He worked on several commissions for paintings for the royal Palace of Versailles, and for Louis XV and his wife, Queen Marie Leczinska. |
Work |
Coypel was an excellent tapestry designer. He designed tapestries for the Gobelins manufactory. His most successful tapestries were created from a series illustrating Don Quixote. Coypel was the first to illustrate Don Quixote in a sophisticated manner. These illustrations were painted as cartoons for tapestries, and were engraved and published in a deluxe folio in Paris in 1724. Coypel created twenty-eight small paintings for these tapestries over a number of years. Each of the paintings was used as the centrepiece of a larger area that was richly decorated with birds, small animals, and garlands of flowers on a patterned background. Over two hundred pieces of the Don Quixote series were woven between 1714 and 1794. He received a commission to design a series of theatrical scenes for tapestries for the queen of Poland in 1747. Coypel also wrote prose, several comedies, two tragedies, and some poetry. |
Alongside his painting career, Coypel wrote some forty plays between 1717 and 1747. Only Les Folies de Cardenio (1720) was published. It was staged at the Tuileries Palace in 1721. In La Poésie et la Peinture (Allegory of Painting), allegorical comedy in three acts, the artist compared the qualities of both arts. The painter also realized works on the theme of the theater, including portraits of the Comédie-Française players Charlotte Desmares and Adrienne Lecouvreur. |
Selected works |
Jason and Medea (1715) – Coypel's reception piece for the Académie Royale, now at Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin |
Painting Ejecting Thalia (1732) – Norfolk, Chrysler Museum of Art |
Self-Portrait (1734) – J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Fury of Achilles (1737) – Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg |
Self-Portrait (1739) – Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans |
Portrait of Philippe Coypel and His Wife (1742) – Exhibited at the Salon of 1742, now at the Art Institute of Chicago |
Gallery |
Works by Charles-Antoine Coypel |
References |
Further reading |
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