The urban romantic: Caspar David Friedrich and the city (Germany)

Caspar David Friedrich gained his reputation painting the German countryside, but the artist remained a city dweller his entire life. This dissertation investigates the urban presence in his work, i.e. the inclusion of towns and urban wanderers as subject matter and the urban perspective that informed his landscapes. Its underlying aim is to disrupt the standard narrative of Friedrich as a reclusive monk investigating infinite nature, in order to view him instead as a social creature, influenced by the urban culture in which he was embedded. In doing so, it seeks to “denaturalize” Friedrich's production, so that the cultural constructedness of his work becomes more readily visible.; Although the discourse on nature is a hallmark of German Romanticism, the city also became an object of inquiry during the period, and cityscapes found a growing audience alongside landscape painting. The urban places Friedrich depicted were those that played the most significant roles in his life: the Baltic medieval towns of his youth and the Baroque city in which he lived his entire adulthood, Dresden. In his work, the small Gothic town acts as the essence of Heimat, or home, and becomes the bearer of meaning in a way that Dresden never does. The artist's attachment to Dresden, which offered him opportunities a small town could not, remained an ambivalent one, and his images of the Saxon capital reflect a sense of disconnect between himself and his adopted hometown.; Investigating the urban foundations of Friedrich's production allows for a deeper understanding of his imaging of nature by opening up discussion of the urban cultivation of the countryside. Town and country were inextricably linked during the Romantic era, despite their perceived opposition to one another. The Romantic devotion to nature emerged while German society itself was becoming more urbanized, its material needs increasingly encroaching upon the resources of the countryside. Considering Friedrich primarily as an urban-based artist exposes the connections between his art and his time, overturning the usual emphasis on the artist's peculiarities.