Caspar David Friedrich

Monk by the Sea, 1808–10. Caspar David Friedrich. Oil on canvas. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
Many of Friedrich's early paintings, made amid the instability and violence that engulfed German lands during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), depict emblems of suffering and consolation: Christian crosses, crucifixes, and long-abandoned Catholic monasteries, common to German terrain. Friedrich invigorated his subjects with manipulations of perspective and atmosphere that emphasize the wonder and yearning of a personal journey of belief. The artist’s portrayals of the landscape as a site of sacred encounter made his art a flashpoint in culture-wide clashes over religious doctrine and new notions of spiritual life. One of his most extraordinary meditations on faith is Monk by the Sea. This radically minimalist composition evokes, in Friedrich’s own words “the unknowable hereafter… the darkness of the future! Which is only ever sacred intuition, to be seen and recognized only in belief.”