Peter Davidson at Literary Review:
The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who is celebrated in these two books published to accompany the exhibitions in Hamburg and Berlin marking the 250th anniversary of his birth, has fascinated me all my life. When I was at school, his mysterious and emotive paintings started to appear on the covers of the grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics series: Abbey in the Oakwood on the cover of Hermann Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund; Woman at a Window (the woman’s back turned, one shutter open to the spring morning and the riverbank) on that of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. Covers featuring Sea of Ice, with its unfathomable grey-blue sky, and the yearning, autumnal Moonwatchers soon followed. Every image was memorable; every one hinted at emotional and spiritual depths embodied in northern European landscapes and places.
This fascination led me to attempt an undergraduate dissertation on the halted traveller in Romantic poetry and painting. I was following an intuition that Friedrich’s solitary figure in the storm-lit uplands of Mountain Landscape with Rainbow resonated with those moments of disquiet in Wordsworth’s Prelude that are perceptions of sublimity in nature shot through with loneliness and melancholy: ‘forlorn cascades/Among the windings of the mountain brooks’.
more here.
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