Friedrich, Caspar David
Entry updated 15 June 2026. Tagged: Artist.
(1774-1840) German painter of interest within the framework of this encyclopedia for his Romantic luminously Early Romantic horizon-governed landscapes, visions very frequently the focus of the outward gaze of a Rückenfigur [or "back-figure"], a man (usually) seen with his back to the viewer. The Rückenfigur is found throughout the history of the visual arts in the West, but was most conspicuously utilized by Friedrich, in seascapes like "The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1810), and very frequently after that date. In the twenty-first century, the Rückenfigur has mostly (it seems) been doomed interminably to depict action figures in Videogames. Although a poignance – cousin to desiderium (or even to a kind of frozen saudade) – clearly irradiates these figures facing away from an unknowable past, as evident in the work of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) and others, it is clearly arguable that the unknowable Sublime into which the Rückenfigur gazes may be envisioned as a rapture unfolding from a world to come. The borderline the Rückenfigur stands upon opens, in other words, upon the planet itself.
Friedrich's visual world has been cited with some frequency in sf Illustrations, either literally or by association. [JC]
Caspar David Friedrich
born Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania [now Germany]: 5 September 1774
died Dresden, Saxony [now Germany]: 7 May 1840
about the artist (selected)
- Helmut Börsch-Supan. Caspar David Friedrich: Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildmäige Zeichnungen (Munich, Germany: Prestel, 1973) [nonfiction: fourth iteration of this text, as translated below: illus/hb/Caspar David Friedrich]
- Helmut Börsch-Supan. Caspar David Friedrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) [nonfiction: trans by Sarah Twohig and John William Gabriel: illus/hb/Caspar David Friedrich]
- Helmut Börsch-Supan. Caspar David Friedrich (Munich, Germany: Prestel, 1990) [nonfiction: exp of the above: illus/hb/Caspar David Friedrich]
- Helmut Börsch-Supan. Caspar David Friedrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) [nonfiction: trans by Sarah Twohig and John William Gabriel: illus/hb/Caspar David Friedrich]
- Florian Illies. Zauber der Stille: Caspar David Friedrich Reise durch die Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2025) [nonfiction: illus/hb/Caspar David Friedrich]
- Florian Illies. The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich's Journey Through Time (Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Polity, 2026) [nonfiction: trans by Tony Crawford: illus/hb/Caspar David Friedrich]
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