Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape

"Of the German painters at the end of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, the best known outside Germany is probably Caspar David Friedrich. His landscape paintings – craggy mountains, beaches along endless seas, ancient forests, often with one or two figures of men and women who observe this world, are part of it, but also threatened by it – are metaphors not only for the human condition in general, but often also for life in Central Europe after the French Revolution, torn by war and conquest, the destruction of old loyalties, and the emergence of a new nationalism. In 1813 Friedrich began a prophetic painting of a French cuirassier, his horse run off or dead, slowly walking into a deep forest, a symbol of Germany since the time of the Roman Empire, from which he will not emerge. In 1813 German opposition to Napoleon was expanding from the relatively limited wars of the ancien régime into something more encompassing. In The Cognitive Challenge of War I analyse this painting as an indication of one of the decisive military changes of the time, a new participation of broad segments of the population in wars that in the preceding centuries had been fought mainly by professionals. In his monograph on Friedrich, Joseph Leo Koerner does not discuss the painting of the cuirassier at length, but he gives a comprehensive, thoughtful analysis of Friedrich’s life and work, and places him in Western art of the early 19th century, in which gradually Friedrich’s work, its uniqueness notwithstanding, comes to blend more closely with that of the British and French Romantic painters."