Caspar David Friedrich valuation
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and The Monk by the Sea, by the painter of German Romanticism's spiritual landscapes.
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was born in Greifswald, on the Baltic coast of what was then Swedish Pomerania, studied at the Academy in Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 and settled in Dresden, where he lived for the rest of his life.
What a work by Caspar David Friedrich is worth
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Bio
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was born in Greifswald, on the Baltic coast of what was then Swedish Pomerania, studied at the Academy in Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 and settled in Dresden, where he lived for the rest of his life. His landscapes of the Baltic coast, the island of Rügen and the mountains of Bohemia and the Harz, with lone figures seen from behind, ruined abbeys and crosses on mountain tops, turned landscape into religious and philosophical painting; The Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood were bought by the Prussian royal family in 1810. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, of about 1818, is in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. His reputation faded in his later years and was revived in the early twentieth century, and the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2024 brought major exhibitions in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden.
Paintings by Friedrich are rare and almost all in German museums, and when one comes to market it is an event. Drawings and sepia studies appear more often, and the main question with any Friedrich-like picture is attribution: his circle in Dresden, including his friend the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl, the physician and painter Carl Gustav Carus and pupils such as August Heinrich, painted in closely related styles, and later imitators borrowed his motifs. The catalogue raisonné by Helmut Börsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig, published in 1973, remains the reference, and technical study and provenance settle doubtful cases.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
