Caspar David Friedrich
Romanticism also embraced those with a taste for the tragic.
The idea of an individual standing alone against the Universe appealed to people who were cut adrift from the reassurance of religion yet disenchanted with the materialism which had replaced it. The natural world became a counterfoil to prevailing secular views for artists and writers alike. To contemplate nature became for them a way of opening oneself to eternal realities, to a spirituality which didn't necessarily depend on religion. But the natural world itself was also invested with emotion by them.
Amongst those who expressed this in their art was the German artist, Caspar David Friedrich.
In Friedrich's art, the landscape becomes as much the subject as the people he places within it, and it is not the nature of Beatrix Potter ...
Woman and Man Contemplating the Moon
1824
In this painting, he has two people considering the distant moon - as a thing of science? a symbol of love? They are surrounded by an ominous forest, unaware perhaps, that the tree is reaching out for them. It's worth noting that Friedrich was painting at the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting their folk tales, where forests and mountains became dangerous, foreboding places.
His painting Das Eismeer is particularly interesting in that it deals with a natural subject which would not have been familiar to most of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, with its jagged shapes and the crushed ship to the right of the picture, it presents the viewer with nature as a hostile enemy.
Das Eismeer
(The Ice Sea)
1823
Some readers might know Paul Nash's 1941 painting Totes Meer (Dead Sea) where derelict warplanes are piled in a tragic and futile heap. I haven't researched this but given the title and the composition, I can only imagine that Nash had Friedrich's painting clearly in his mind.
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The idea that subjects could be both terrifying and yet compelling, was a strong influence within the Romantic movement. They called it The Sublime.
You can read more about it here.
It's easy for us to forget what a recent idea 'the individual' is.
But before, say, 1500 the idea that our identity subsisted within ourselves would have seemed strange. Until the Protestant Reformation, one's identity was intimately tied up with being part of the Church, part of a community, part of a family. By the 18th/19th centuries, people were more familiar with the notion that we stood, as it were, on our own two feet. In Romanticism, the conscious autonomous individual is very much both the actor and the victim. This is most obvious, their work suggests, when a person is confronted by nature.
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
1818
Does anyone else find themselves put in mind of Wordsworth?
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once ... (1804)
The solitary rambler in the natural world, brought to a halt by the view in front of them.
One of the things we probably don't realise we are seeing in Friedrich's work is that he has clothed his people in old-fashioned German dress.