Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) reimagined European landscape painting by portraying nature as a setting for profound spiritual and emotional encounters. Working in the vanguard of the German Romantic movement, which championed a radical new understanding of the bond between nature and the inner self, Friedrich developed pictorial subjects and strategies that emphasize the individuality, intimacy, open-endedness, and complexity of our responses to the natural world. The vision of the landscape that unfolds in his art—meditative, mysterious, and full of wonder—is still vital today. 

Inspired by the 250th anniversary of Friedrich’s birth, the exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which are presenting independent exhibitions of Friedrich’s work in 2023–24 as part of the artist’s jubilee celebrations in Germany. Following these shows, The Met’s exhibition will feature unprecedented loans from all three institutions—the most substantial collections of Friedrich’s work in the world—and from more than 30 other public and private lenders in Europe and North America. Despite Friedrich’s celebrated reputation, there have been only two exhibitions dedicated to his work in the United States: The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the U.S.S.R., held at The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990–91 and featuring 9 paintings and 11 drawings by Friedrich; and Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers at The Met in 2001, which included 7 paintings and 2 drawings by the artist.

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature will present approximately 75 oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches from every phase of the artist’s career, along with select examples by his contemporaries, illuminating Friedrich’s development of a symbolic vocabulary of landscape motifs to convey the personal and existential meanings that he discovered in nature. Among the loans that will be exhibited for the first time in the United States are Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Hamburger Kunsthalle) and Monk by the Sea (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie), two of the most iconic paintings in Friedrich’s oeuvre and in all of Romantic art. Many other signature works, such as Dolmen in Autumn (Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), have not been seen in the United States for decades. The exhibition will also bring together for the first time all five of the Friedrich paintings owned by museums in the United States (The Met, the Kimbell Art Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum), placing these rare American holdings in the broader context of Friedrich’s art. A rich selection of works on paper from both domestic and international collections will showcase Friedrich’s talents as a draftsman and the centrality of drawing to his creative practice, an aspect of his production that is unfamiliar to most museum audiences in the United States. As a partnership between specialists in paintings and drawings, the exhibition will also consider the ways that the artist’s pictorial interests persisted and shifted across media and how different materials and techniques prompted his formal and thematic innovations.