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Hotspur🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦 /
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2024-09-06 00:18:00

Hotspur🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦 on Nostr: "Landscape with Mountain Lake, Morning," Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1823-35. Happy ...

"Landscape with Mountain Lake, Morning," Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1823-35.

Happy birthday to Caspar David Friedrich, born this day in 1774!

He was THE great Romantic artist, often doing allegorical paintings of human figures contemplating some natural scene that dwarfs them...or maybe Gothic ruins (because, after all, Gothicism is an outgrowth of Romanticism).

Here he's got a small human figure pausing by the side of a lake in a dramatic mountain landscape. If you squint a little, you can make out a large building on the other side of the lake, perhaps a palace of some sort (just over the man's head) but it's overwhelmed in size and majesty by the lake and the mountains. This is Friedrich's message...that Nature will always be bigger than Man.

His tragedy was that he outlived his fame; his style went out of fashion and when he died in 1840, he was lonely and half-forgotten. But in modern times he's been rediscovered and his art revived...especially as it's now in public domain and has been used as cover art for various editions of Gothic novels and the like. His dramatic views help set the tone.

From a private collection.

#Art #GermanArt #Romanticism #CasparDavidFriedrich #landscape

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