The Painter of Stillness

In 1817 the Swedish poet Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom visited the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in Dresden. A good thirty years later, he wrote down his recollections of the artist. With painstaking slowness, this strange character had placed his strokes one by one on the canvas, evoking for Atterbom the image of a "mystic with a brush". Mystical figures and brilliant geniuses were the heroes beloved of Romanticism. Youths wearing enthusiastic expressions or with dreamy eyes, artists who died young in the melancholy awareness of their social isolation peopled the portrait galleries of the years around 1800: the English poet Lord Byron, the German writer Novalis, the musical wunderkind Mendelssohn and the young painters Gericault in France and Runge in Germany. A picture in a similar vein exists of Friedrich, too: between 1806 and 1809, Gerhard von Kugelgen (1772-1820) painted the demonized portrait of his friend, seen in half-length and with the passion of Goethe's "Werther" in his gaze. Louise Seidler, the rather schoolmarmish painter who enjoyed Goethe's patronage and who from 1823 onwards was employed in the Weimar ducal household as drawing mistress to the princesses, was prompted by Friedrich's blue eyes and blonde sideburns to compare him to an ancient Teuton - admittedly, as she said, "a pious, femininely delicate one".