Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature

Met Museum publications make the perfect gifts for art lovers.

By Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein
with essays by Joseph Leo Koerner and Cordula Grewe

The paintings and drawings of the nineteenth-century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) brilliantly illuminate our experience of the natural world. This generously illustrated volume explores how Friedrich, who created some of the most indelible images of Romantic art, deployed signature motifs—moonlit skies, Gothic ruins, isolated figures, and misty panoramas—together with innovative compositional strategies to create paintings and drawings that are metaphorically rich and emotionally profound. Friedrich worked at the dawn of a new understanding in Europe of the human relationship with the nature, as German artists and intellectuals elevated the exploration of nature into a journey of self-discovery, yielding insights into spirituality, mortality, identity, and history. Essays by leading scholars examine Friedrich's career, considering how he created a new and open-ended pictorial language to express the Romantic vision of nature. Placing his works in cultural and historic context, the authors evaluate his status as an icon of German Romanticism and as a touchstone for visual culture in the United States, while also exploring his working methods and the complex themes that underpinned his art.

Alison Hokanson is curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.