RISCO || Christa Zaat

Caspar David Friedrich (German painter) 1774 - 1840
Felsenriff am Meeressstrand (Rocky Reef on the Sea Shore), 1822-23
oil on canvas
22 x 31 cm.
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, Germany

This painting is closely related to The Sea of Ice (Kunsthalle, Hamburg) and it was probably executed only shortly afterwards. It probably depicts the western tip of the Isle of Wight off Bournemouth, a view which Friedrich may have known from engravings. The rocky needles in the sea recall the ice formations in the Hamburg painting.

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Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.[2] He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".
Christa Zaat