The Sea of Ice

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a humble man who lived a sombre, ascetic existence. Descriptions of the artist are notably of an individual living a puritanical life, in austere solitude.

Originating from the Baltic coast, he was raised in a somewhat icy environment – both geographically and within his strictly Lutheran childhood home. His father, a candle maker, rarely spoke. The artist’s mother died when he was a boy of seven.

Despite the bleakness surrounding his life, it is misleading to only see Friedrich’s work as symbolic of loneliness or tragedy. Rather, he felt mankind could be empowered by the romanticism of nature, basking in the glory and mysteries of the cosmos. This way, Friedrich believed, we come to understand pain, love and suffering, even transcending fears of death. As the artist stated, ‘I must stay alone and know I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full.’

The importance of embracing and accepting solitude is of central importance to the painter’s work. Friedrich had only a handful of friends, and rarely left his studio. Indeed, his paintings were easily ignored by traditionalists in the art community, and the state Academy.

It was not until after Friedrich’s death in 1840 that his body of work gained any acceptance or admiration. In the 1823–24 painting The Sea of Ice came the emergence of a stark, radical composition which totally flew in the face of the painterly norms of the era.

At this time, man’s relationship with nature was generally perceived as a harmonious one; artists were frequently expected to represent their patron’s material wealth, and the abundance of land they possessed. Sunny, rolling fields and babbling brooks were the order of the day, a style which Friedrich would not conform to.

He also horrified contemporaries with his depiction of Jesus. The Testschen Altar of 1807, was considered scandalous by the standards of the Academy. Christianity had been an integral part of European culture, and artists were expected to work rigidly within the commonplace strictures in the representation of Christ, out of an inherent fear and respect for God and the Church.

A classical representation of the crucifixion, as seen in the late Renaissance, would often show Christ’s dignified suffering, surrounded by soldiers, sailors, tradesmen and weeping women or angels.

But the public were growing more open to the concept of spirituality, as opposed to the dogmatic approach to religion adopted by previous generations. Friedrich’s depiction of Christ shows the crucifixion taking place amongst a mass of pine trees, the golden glow of the sun’s rays bathing the forest and Christ’s tortured body.

He clearly believed nature to be the ultimate manifestation of God. He felt strongly that through mists and fogs, icy mornings, solemn trees, still waters, moonlit oceans and the deep richness of the night sky, we experience spirituality. Ultimately, however, he seeks to make us aware of our insignificance in the face of the infinite.

Indicative of Friedrich’s perceptions, The Sea of Ice is dark and looming, romanticising a bitterly cold, hostile landscape. The picture was the artist’s imagined representation of the shipwreck of HMS Griper, in one of William Edward Parry’s early 19th-century polar expeditions.

The composition of jagged, knife-like icicles comes to form a tombstone, lost in time and acting as an elegy to the lost souls on board the ship. The expeditionary voyage was not a smooth one, as indicated by the tempestuous, sharp composition of the work. Parry had to combat layers of thick ice, and eventually found his boat blocked and stranded. The captain and crew were sealed inside the ice for a harrowing ten months, with many of the crew contracting scurvy.

But by summer, the thick ice gradually melted enough to allow Parry to make a miraculous return to the shores of England, having lost only one man along the way.

A sister painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog was later used as the cover artwork for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She wrote: ‘for some time I studied the view overlooking the sea of ice. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a troubled sea.’

It is no surprise that Friedrich’s relationship with nature was a complex one – the artist had suffered greatly at the hands of the elements. On one particularly freezing winter day when he was thirteen, young Friedrich was ice-fishing with his older brother Johann. Suddenly, Friedrich crashed through the ice into the frosty depths of the lake. Johann endeavoured to rescue his younger sibling and consequently sacrificed his own life, drowning before

Friedrich’s eyes.

The artist had previously lost his two closest sisters, Elizabeth and Maria to typhus. His relationship with death and suffering is always endowed with the heaviness of personal experience. Instead of the flowery niceties associated with landscape painting of the time, Friedrich’s work unsurprisingly remained raw and heavily tied to his own sense of melancholy. Yet, it was never his intent to alarm the viewer – rather to help us understand that sadness is a part of all humanity.

Friedrich could never evade poverty. Given his spartan, Lutheran upbringing and spiritual character and temperament, it is perhaps no surprise that Friedrich was not a financially motivated individual.

Towards the end of his life, he suffered a stroke, leaving him with increasing limb paralysis, his ability to paint somewhat diminished.

His work became heavily laden with images symbolic of death.

When he finally died in 1840, his passing caused little stir within the artistic community. Sadly, prior to his death, the artist became more and more dependent upon the charity of friends, while living in obscurity.

It was not until the early 20^th century that the artist’s true significance began to emerge. The Surrealists and Expressionists were captivated by his works, drawing upon their sensuous and unconventional undertones.

Unfortunately, in the 1930s the Nazi party decided to appropriate Friedrich’s legacy, misrepresenting the artist’s affinity with nature for their interpretation of Wagnerian nationalism. The painter’s work yet again fell out of popularity. It did not receive a resurgence of widespread admiration until more recent years, as the traumas of World War II slowly began to fade.