Far more than offering us a rustic church nestled in a quiet grove of trees, Casper David Friedrich’s Abbey among the Oak Trees set the stage for 200 years of gothic horror. This artist had a lot to do with establishing the landscape we associate with ghost stories, vampire tales, and “dark and stormy” Halloween nights.

So revolutionary they sold to royalty the first time he showed them, Friedrich’s richly imaginative and symbolic paintings epitomize Romanticism. The term, in art and literary writing, refers to an artistic and intellectual movement that rose and declined between 1750 and 1850 in Europe and North America.  

Friedrich’s work, like those of the many Romantic artists who followed him, opened the creative doors to strong emotion, imagination, the subconscious and the supernatural, dreams, madness, the unknown.

Objecting to the use of landscape in a religious context, critics condemned Casper David Friedrich’s first exhibited oil painting, Cross in the Mountains of 1808, an altarpiece intended for a wealthy family’s private chapel.

The Abbey Among the Oak Trees 

In The Abbey among the Oak Trees, as Berlin’s German National Gallery describes it, “Monks carry a coffin into a deserted Gothic ruin to hold a requiem mass under the cross. The graveyard with its crooked, sunken tombstones is equally deserted. Bare oaks reach up into the sky as though in complaint.”

Is it sunrise or sunset? According to the Alte Nationalgalerie, we are present at the break of daylight: “The first light of dawn is appearing over the horizon like an ocher-yellow veil, outshining the tender curve of the crescent moon. The visionary gleam of the heavenly realm is completely detached from the earthly regions, which are still sunk in darkness.”

DETAIL (note dimly visible twin lights on the crucifix) Casper David Friedrich, The Abbey among the Oak Trees, 171.0 x 110.4 cm, oil, 1810

“One sign of hope is in the two single lights on the crucifix,” say the curators. “For the painter Carl Gustav Carus, who was also a friend of Friedrich’s, this painting was “of all recent landscapes, possibly the most deeply poetic work of art.” 

This painting has a companion piece, The Monk by the Sea, which Friedrich displayed at the same exhibition. 

Casper David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808-1809

In Monk by the Sea “a human being stands lost in the apocalyptic loneliness and infinity of nature and the cosmos. He meditates on life and its boundaries,” the museum says. 

Some art historians have named The Monk by the Sea among the first nearly abstract paintings and one of the earliest visual statements of what would become the modern philosophy of existentialism.

At the request of the 15-year-old crown prince, Germany’s King Friedrich Wilhelm III bought both paintings, The Abbey and The Monk. “In their perplexing remoteness and formal radicalism they were to become key works in German Romanticism,” says the Berlin museum. 

Friedrich’s source for his work was his imagination, or what he would have called his soul: “Close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye,” the artist urged his students. “Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards.” 

“To many it is incomprehensible that art has to emerge from a person’s inner being,” Friedrich wrote, “that it has to do with one’s morality, one’s religion.” But so it does. “You should trade only in what you recognize to be true and beautiful, noble and good in your soul.” 

Go Behind the Scenes

Private viewings of the great paintings of Europe are the focus of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine’s Behind the Scenes art trips, the latest of which (to Stockholm and Madrid) will be departing shortly. Hosted by Fine Art Connoisseur Publisher Eric Rhoads and Editor-in-Chief Peter Trippi, this is a continuation of an 11-year tradition.

These special art tours offer the chance to see art from a new perspective with excursions to museums, visits with artists, and iconic art experiences that take advantage of the editors’ deep contacts in the art world. Learn more here about the Behind the Scenes fine art trips.