A Romantic Trip to Bavaria

He's the almost exact contemporary of JMW Turner and John Constable, and, like them, he's renowned for his atmospheric landscapes, but Caspar David Friedrich is a very different painter. One of the greatest artists of the Romantic movement, and one of the greatest from the German-speaking world, he's being celebrated in a series of exhibitions across Germany and beyond to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth next year. 

We thought we should make an early start, and so we headed for Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria, where the Museum Georg Schäfer is hosting Caspar David Friedrich and the Harbingers of the Romantic. And before we go further, we have to tell you that it's a fantastic show -- one of the best we've been to over the past 12 months -- with some of Friedrich's finest pictures, beautifully presented. 

Now Friedrich isn't that familiar to a British audience -- there's just one painting in London's National Gallery -- but in Germany he's a national treasure. There's a major exhibition in Hamburg to come over the winter, followed by shows next year in Berlin and Dresden, with a retrospective scheduled for New York in 2025. And if you're wondering about the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt? Well, the city is a major industrial centre, Schäfer was a ball-bearing manufacturer, and the museum houses some of the vast collection of 19th-century German art he amassed, including, of course, quite a lot by Friedrich.  

This extensive exhibition looks at Friedrich's work in the context of a long history of landscape painting, going back to Dutch and French artists of the 17th century such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain and bringing in some of Friedrich's contemporaries from Germany and the Nordic countries. We enjoyed those, but it was Caspar David we came to see, and where better to start than with the painting that graces the cover of the exhibition catalogue: Chalk Cliffs on Rügen.

Friedrich was born in Greifswald, a university city close to the Baltic Sea, in 1774. At that time it was ruled by Sweden, as was the island of Rügen, just to the north, as famous in Germany for its chalk cliffs as the White Cliffs of Dover or Beachy Head are in England. 

Like so many of Friedrich's paintings, the Chalk Cliffs convey, however contradictory it sounds, a feeling of quiet calm in the midst of sheer drama. The cliffs are absolutely precipitous -- one man is lying down, peering over the edge, while the woman is pointing at something a long way down -- and that finger of chalk is spectacular, especially with the framing of the overhanging tree. Their companion, arms folded, stares serenely out at the sea, its expanse broken only by a couple of tiny sailing boats. 

The precise view Friedrich painted is no longer there: Erosion has changed the outline of the coast. But it's an inspiring image; and it surely influenced the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans' End of Land I, a picture of Beachy Head with a woman lying flat perilously near to the cliff edge that we saw recently in the Sussex Landscape exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

There's the same combination of drama and calm in what is possibly Friedrich's most famous painting: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. 

What an atmospheric, emotion-laden image. One man, alone, (almost) on top of the world, in a mountainous landscape that, not so many years previously, would have filled people with dread. But in Friedrich's era, there was an appreciation of the majesty of such awe-inspiring landscapes. It's such an iconic painting, but as so often with such pictures, it's not quite as big as you suspect it will be (or as you remember) when you stand in front of it -- just 95 by 75 centimetres. And if you're not familiar with Friedrich, you may now be coming to suspect that figures seen from the back are one of his trademarks.  

Trees, too. Sometimes solitary trees, sometimes forests, sometimes blasted oaks. 

In a Germany that in the early 19th century was struggling against Napoleon's attempt to bring all Europe under his control, you might attribute a certain significance to a cairn marking the grave of perhaps a prehistoric warrior surrounded by some German oak trees, battered, but still surviving. 

The ruins of Eldena Abbey on the outskirts of Greifswald feature in a number of paintings by Friedrich. We didn't find them that atmospheric when we visited them a few years ago, but suburban development hasn't helped.  

Through the magic of art, Friedrich transported the ruins hundreds of miles to the south, to the Riesengebirge or Giant Mountains, on what is today the border between Poland and the Czech Republic. It's dusk.... but for the Romantic painter the night was nothing to fear. 

In previous centuries, painters had established the night as a metaphor for loneliness, or for the helplessness of man amid nature. One engraving after Rubens (on show here) depicts two men with a heavily laden horse-drawn cart about to overturn on a bumpy road as dusk falls. No help is in sight, making it clear that when darkness falls, you are on your own. 

  
For Friedrich the sensation was different. As fellow German artist Carl Gustav Carus recalled: "The twilight was his element, early in the morning light a solitary walk and a second in the evening at or after dusk." 

There's a lot of dusk and dawn and moonlight from Friedrich in this show: Moonrise over the Sea, with three figures watching from the shore; a Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, by a gnarled tree; and one we hadn't seen before, from the Schweinfurt collection, Evening, with two walkers following a path through a very lonely forest. 

And after all those night-time scenes, how about falling asleep on the bed beneath this headboard?

By Philipp Otto Runge, it's the one work not by Friedrich in this exhibition that we really adored. Sweet dreams are made of this. 

There's a mystical element surrounding a lot of Friedrich's work, sometimes veering into the odd. This vision of an idealised neo-Gothic cathedral, rising amid clouds and an accompaniment of angels, was another painting we'd not come across before.

The final section of the exhibition takes us deep into the mountains of Scandinavia and the Alps and shows how landscapes once seen as terrifying became viewed as sublime. There's not so much from Caspar David in this last couple of rooms -- he never actually made it to the Alps -- but we do get a taste of what he might have painted in the shape of the 15-years-younger Carus's view of the glacier at Chamonix.

It's not the way Turner saw the Alps, is it?

Practicalities

Caspar David Friedrich and the Harbingers of the Romantic is on at the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt until July 2. The museum is normally open from 1000 to 1700, with lates on Tuesdays until 2000. It's closed on Mondays, except for public holidays. There are some later opening hours at weekends towards the end of the run -- see the museum's website (in German) for details. Standard entry is an astonishingly good-value 10 euros. It's possible to book online here. We took a good two hours going round this exhibition; be warned, though, that the wall texts are in German only. We did feel the need to interrupt our visit for a refreshment break in the museum cafe at one stage. 

The museum is situated in the town centre by the River Main, a few minutes walk from Schweinfurt Stadt and Schweinfurt Mitte stations, which are served by local trains. The main station, Schweinfurt Hauptbahnhof, is not very central, though it does have direct (albeit slowish) services from both Frankfurt and Nuremberg. 

The exhibition moves on to the Kunst Museum in Winterthur, Switzerland, starting there on August 26. 

While you're in the Museum Georg Schäfer....

The highlights of the main collection include some fine paintings by Germany's leading Impressionist, Max Liebermann, but perhaps the most enjoyable room is the one devoted to Carl Spitzweg, noted for his gently humorous vignettes such as The Cactus Enthusiast and The Bookworm.

Not far away from Schweinfurt....

The nearest significant tourist destinations, Würzburg and Bamberg, are each about half-an-hour by train; Würzburg houses one of the greatest Baroque art treasures anywhere in the world, the Residence of the prince-bishops. More specifically, it's the magnificent staircase designed by Balthasar Neumann that's the draw, crowned by the largest ceiling fresco ever painted, on which Giovanni Battista Tiepolo depicted the four continents then known. This Unesco world heritage site is exuberant, extravagant, glorious and unforgettable.

Images

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, 1818, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Stiftung Oskar Reinhart. © SIK-ISEA, Zürich, Philipp Hitz

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, about 1817, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Permanent loan of Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen. © SHK/Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk (Photo: Elke Walford)

Caspar David Friedrich, Cairn in the Snow, 1807, Albertinum/Galerie Neuer Meister, Dresden. © Albertinum/GNM, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Photo: Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut)

Caspar David Friedrich, Ruins of Eldena Abbey in the Riesengebirge, around 1830-34, Stiftung Pommersches Landesmuseum, Greifswald. © Stiftung Pommersches Landesmuseum, Greifswald
Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), Moonrise, around 1808, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Stiftung Oskar Reinhart

Caspar David Friedrich, The Cathedral, around 1818, Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt. © bpk, Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt (Photo: Matthias Langer)

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869), The Mer de Glace at Chamonix, 1825/27, Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt. © bpk, Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt (Photo: Matthias Langer)