In honor of the 250th anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich’s birth in 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the artist in the United States.
Organized in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and Hamburger Kunsthalle, the exhibition features unprecedented loans from over 30 lenders across Europe and North America. Approximately 75 works by Friedrich, including oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches from every phase of his career, are showcased alongside select pieces by his contemporaries.
This collection illuminates how Friedrich developed a symbolic vocabulary of landscape motifs to express personal and existential meanings found in nature. The exhibition also places Friedrich’s art within the context of the tumultuous politics and vibrant culture of 19th-century German society, highlighting the role of German Romanticism in shaping modern perceptions of the natural world.
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.
