Casper David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog epitomizes the awe-inspiring sublime in Romantic art.
The sublime is an offshoot of Romanticism referring to a “realm of experience beyond the measurable.” It’s often associated with a sort of diminishment of human sovereignty amid the terrors and desolation of awe-inspiring natural phenomena.
Friedrich’s Romantic image finds its literary counterpart in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (published on January 1 of the same year).
“The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me…. a scene terrifically desolate…. rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it.”
“The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock…. and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds.”
The experience of the Sublime, and Romanticism in general, requires the individual to participate in an imaginative, emotional response to nature. In Mary Shelley’s novel, full of “a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul,” and reveling in the “solitary grandeur of the scene,” the haunted scientist utters a desperate (and mega-Romantic) creed, part death-wish, part prayer:
“Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.”
Casper David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, oil, 1818
In Friedrich’s painting, because the figure’s back is turned toward us, the viewer can easily occupy his place in the landscape. We understand that the scene we’re viewing is being filtered through human sensation.
The painter has divided it into a darker, solid ground and a ghostlier swirl of weightless mists and clouds. We stand with the figure on a final stony outcropping of earth amid the drifting, icy air of the heights.
Casper David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice (The Polar Sea) oil on canvas, 3′ 2″ x 4′ 2″ (1824)
Friedrich went all-in on the sublimity of ice in The Polar Sea, also known as The Sea of Ice and The Wreck of Hope, (above). Here Friedrich omits the figure and maximizes the sublime indifference of nature. And yet the antagonistic relationship between man and nature is there:
Look closely, and amidst the forbidding desolation and natural forces, you can see the stern of a ship trapped in the ice being slowly crushed to pieces and consumed. A writer in Time Magazine in 1974 nailed exactly what’s going on in this painting: “the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world’s immense and glacial indifference.”
“Friedrich!” said French sculptor David d’Angers, who visited the artist in Dresden in 1834 a year before the first of a series of strokes that ended Friedrich’s life in 1840. “Frierich!” d’Anger exclaimed, “The only landscape painter so far to succeed in stirring up all the forces of my soul, the painter who has created a new genre: the tragedy of the landscape.”
In addition to his paintings, Friedrich left behind a book of aphorisms, including the following advice for painters who wish to affect viewers on the spiritual level:
“Close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye,” he wrote. “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.”
A Mountain of Inspiration
If your mountains are less than majestic, there’s a video all about how to paint them. BILL BAYER: MOUNTAINS includes “Old Masters” techniques using transparent/opaque color, how value affects depth and form, using color mixing, drawing, brush handling, and the use of a basic palette for beginners. The video includes supplemental printed Instructions, photo references, drawings, and a color mixing guide. Check it out here.
Rockin’ Realism Live
Inside Art publisher Eric Rhoads rocks hits the Realism Live demo stage
Last week saw the wrap-up of the fourth annual Realism Live online art conference, hosted by Publisher Eric Rhoads and Fine Art Connoisseur Editor-in-Chief Peter Trippi. This unparalleled event featured many of contemporary realism’s leading artists.
You can check out highlights and Access the replays here for a limited time!) Realism Live’s sponsors this year were Blick Art Materials, and Sennelier, Fabriano & Raphael.
