Dolmen in the Snow (1807).
Some paintings for the Winter Solstice by one of my favourite Romantic artists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Snow scenes tend to inspire picturesque cliché but in Friedrich’s paintings winter is merely another season in which to evoke his Christian mysticism through the depiction of landscape. The pagan dolmen above is an unusual subject, far more common are churchyard ruins and mountainside crosses although he was also happy enough painting luminous landscapes, especially of mountains and the sea. His treatment of natural light is quite extraordinary and his photo-realist style makes an interesting contrast with the similar effects captured by JMW Turner‘s palette of blurs and smears.
Monastery Graveyard in the Snow (1819).
I hadn’t noticed before until I looked through some online galleries that Friedrich was painting the same trees over and over. The gnarled trunks in the dolmen painting are almost identical (but reversed) to the foreground trees in the graveyard picture and similarly-shaped trees occur in other paintings. If you’re wondering why the graveyard picture is in black and white, the original was destroyed during the Second World War. Colour copies can be found but I think these may have been tinted from a monochrome photo print.
Winter Landscape (1811).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Winter Solstice
• The art of John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1836–1893
• The art of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781–1841
