Gemeinfrei
()

Abend

Evening
1824
Material / Technik
oil paint
canvas
Hartfaserplatte
Kategorie des Exponats
Malerei
Gattung
landscape painting
Erwerbungsjahr
1916
Maße
20,00 cm x 27,50 cm
Location

Nicht ausgestellt

Intro

What immediately strikes one about Caspar David Friedrich’s »Evening« is the picture excerpt, with almost the entire canvas being filled by the sky and its play of colors. The earth, cloaked in violet, has shrunk to a narrow strip, the viewer’s gaze directed upward into the vastness. Here, Friedrich breaks completely with traditional ideas of landscape painting. Has the Romantic painter simply captured the time of day, or is he concerned with something far more than an evening mood?

As in some of his other landscapes, nature becomes a mirror of human feelings and simultaneously a symbol which transcends the human—including ourselves, the viewers of the painting. The earth appears small and insignificant under the endlessness of the evening sky, while the natural beauty of the yellow-violet sky is overwhelming. Not untypically for Caspar David Friedrich’s pictures, it also harbors a religious dimension, suggested by both the sheer magnitude of the sky and the pictorial perspective: the gaze raised toward the heavens.

Creditline

Kunsthalle Mannheim

Inhalt und Themen
evening
landscape
heaven
clouds
Leere
vastness
light
polychrom polychromatic
Romantik romanticism
orange (colour)
violet

20 by 27 ½ centimeters! How small is this oil painting created in October 1824 by 50-year-old Caspar David Friedrich - but what an amazing vastness he has captured in it! 

A slanted, milky-violet plain with a suggestion of a grove, lying deeply beneath the almost boundless sky. The sun seems to have set just a moment ago since the firmament – still bluish on top – is glowing in the center of the image. Purple and apricot cloud streaks float from right to left. The evening red has tinted the cloud streaks in rosy colors which seem to slowly glide from left to right in the foreground. Two counter-movements are generated which account for this painting’s fascination. 

Caspar David Friedrich, who was painter, draftsman and etcher, had already passed the apex of his career when he captured this evening mood. The artist was born in 1774 in Greifswald, a Hanseatic City with a university situated in Pomerania. Caspar David Friedrich is regarded as THE Romanticist landscape painter par excellence. Time and again he depicted the magical twilight of dawn and dusk, clouds, moonlit nights, unfathomable misty landscapes. His imagery strives towards transcendence, trying to capture God’s creation in Nature.

„Thou shalt keep holy every movement of your temper, respect as holy every pious notion, since it is Art within ourselves! In inspiring hours, it will become visible form; and this form is your painting!“

Such ideas are rather common at the beginning of the 19th century, in reaction to the rationalism embodied by the 18th century. The German city of Dresden - where Friedrich settled after finishing his studies at the Copenhagen Academy - is teeming with Romanticist poets and philosophers which explore the transcendental and are overpowered by an excessive enthusiasm for nature. 

„Close your physical eye to be able to see your picture with your spiritual eye. Then quarry and bring to light what you saw in darkness, so as to achieve a retrograde effect from the external to the internal world.“

Upon Friedrich’s death in 1840, Romanticism had already faded away, his art was forgotten. But the emotional substance of his paintings affects and seduces viewers to this day.

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