grave moments
Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in Oakwood, 1809-10. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Lowkey obsessed with these grave moments by Caspar David Friedrich. While he’s more commonly known for vast, Romantic landscapes, I think these paintings are due some love.
Friedrich was no stranger to tragedy: he’d lost his mother and three of his siblings before he turned 17. Graveyards frequented his work — he even made a few funerary monuments that populate the cemeteries of Dresden. Maybe his attention to the topic was born of personal ties, maybe out of the Romantic obsession with the sublime or maybe they just made for a Gothic game of eye-spy.
True to the expectations of a graveyard, a fair few of Friedrich’s are cold, spooky and desolate, like The Abbey in Oakwood. Cloaked figures carry a coffin past an empty grave toward the ruins of a church. Crosses litter the darkened foreground and weary, knotted trees, reach for the last moments of fading sunlight. Above the scene, a waxing moon signals growth and transition from this life to the next.
Caspar David Friedrich, Cairn in Snow, 1807. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Similarly, Cairn in Snow references a Neolithic burial site near Gützkow — the stone cromlech peeking from beneath a fresh layer of powder. Three colossal oaks frame the cairn, a pagan nod to immortality and a Christian one to the crosses on hill at Golgotha (the site of the Crucifixion). The oakwood and stone signal nature’s permanence outliving mortal matter. And of course, in truly Gothic fashion, an unkindness of ravens accompany the scene.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Cemetery Entrance, 1825. Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
A composite of his eventual burial site and imagined landscapes, Friedrich painted The Cemetery Entrance with a lighter tone than earlier works. Two figures peer through a slightly heavy-handed metaphor for life and death. They gaze on heavy mist, cascading over the hillside and in this twilight zone, spirits quietly appear to an attentive viewer. An angel hovers in the centre of the composition. Wingless shades hide amongst the tussock, delighting anyone who is willing to look a little closer. Painted toward the end of his own life, this work remains unfinished.
