User:Hafspajen/Winterlandschaft


 * Caspar David Friedrich - Winterlandschaft (London).jpg

Winter Landscape or Winter Landscape with Church is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, one of the leading artists of the German Romantic movement and a noted landscape artist. The painting depicts a winter landscape with a male figure praying before a crucifix. A Gothic church appears through the mist in the background, and evergreen firs stand as a visual parallel to the church spires.

The work was acquired by the National Gallery, London, from a private collection in 1987, and was nearly identical to another version of this painting that has been in the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte (Museum of Art and Cultural History) in Dortmund, Germany, since 1940. The London version is identical with that in Dortmund, except for small details.

Painting
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) specialized in landscapes. He wanted his paintings to "reflect the artist’s soul and emotions in the landscape." He was the master of winter landscapes, and these paintings helped to mold the nascent German national identity; they afforded Germans an opportunity to take pride in Germany's sometimes forbidding climate. European artists began painting winter landscapes in Friedrich's time, and this is one of his first.

Friedrich's landscapes were charged with symbolism and sometimes with a religious message. In this work, amid the desolate, misty winter landscape and dark gray sky there is a figure of a young man sitting in the snow. In this lonely and rather grim scene, an intense dialog is taking place between the man leaning back against a boulder who is looking up at the crucifix in front of him and Christ on the cross, who looks down. The crudifix is supported by the cluster of young fir trees. The figure in the snow seems alone with his belief in Christ, supported by his hope in the resurrection.

Some interpret the motif of the crucifix and the church as reference to the security offered by the Christian faith. The fact that the man has flung his crutches far away into the snow could mean that a healing miracle has occurred and he doesn't think he ever will need them again. Others interpret the scene in a more negative way, meaning that he gave up his hope, and this is why he flung his crutches far away. During his lifetime, Friedrich chose to paint what he found interesting rather than trying to confirm with the popular taste, witch made his symbolic themes original and unconventional.

"... These paintings are distinct in subject and mood from his many other paintings that simply evoke melancholia or loneliness through the individual's isolation in nature."

Paintings such as Winter Landscape with Church, finished in 1811 just after the Abbey, show that Friedrich had already established a distinct iconography for the depiction of the soul's transcendence of the barren world through the idealized structure of a church. ... as we can see in works such as Winter Landscape with Church, Friedrich painted many compositions emphasizing loneliness and barren landscapes. subject.

http://www.apieceofmonologue.com/2014/03/caspar-david-friedrich-winter-landscape-national-gallery.html

https://mydailyartdisplay.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/winter-landscapes-by-caspar-david-friedrich/

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