The wanderer with his back to the viewer takes on new life with Thomas Fearnley. Is he the artist’s alter ego?
Carus
Wanderers, wayfarers and pilgrims have walked across continents in search of wisdom, spiritual enlightenment, or a bite to eat and sheltered sleep.
Why would an artist compose a painting to hide the face? Examples by Degas, Anders Zorn, John Singer Sargent and others. It’s our faces that make us human.
A succession of impending landscapes which culminate in ‘Villa by the Sea’, a mysterious Mediterranean view. An early symbolist?
Views from a balcony, notably developed by Gustave Caillebotte in 1880, but continued in paintings by Lovis Corinth, and Pierre Bonnard.
Faust and Mephistopheles attend the witches’ celebrations on the Brocken peak in the Harz Mountains – a wild night, it seems.
Viewed as classic and fit for narrative painting, Faust is about good and evil, a powerful story which has inspired powerful paintings.
In which he establishes separate style and themes from Friedrich, paints some wonderful landscapes in Italy, and explores the nocturne.
What is a professor of obstetrics doing learning to paint with Caspar David Friedrich? Also an important precursor to Darwin, and a friend of Goethe – and wonderful paintings as well.
