NEW YORK, NY.- On February 8, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840); it will be on view through May 11, 2025. Friedrich’s art presents nature as a site of personal and philosophical discovery.

Marshalling the expressive power of perspective, light, color, and atmosphere, the artist created landscapes that articulate a profound connection between the natural world and the inner self, or soul. This imagery encapsulated the newly emerging ideals of Romanticism, a cultural revolution that championed conceptions of individual perception and feeling that are still vital today.

“The most significant German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich brilliantly illuminates our understanding of the natural world as a spiritual and emotional landscape,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “This very first major retrospective in the United States of Germany’s most beloved painter follows the celebrations of Friedrich’s work in Europe on the occasion of the artist’s 250th birthday in 2024. We are thrilled to collaborate with our German museum colleagues and many other generous lenders on this rare opportunity to reflect on Friedrich’s portrayals of nature and the human condition.”

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 house the most substantial collections of Friedrich’s work in the world. In 2023–24, these museums presented hugely popular exhibitions of Friedrich’s art as part of the artist’s jubilee celebrations in Germany.

The Met’s exhibition will feature unprecedented loans from all three institutions and from more than 30 other public and private lenders in Europe and North America. To date, 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 works on paper by Friedrich; and Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers, held at The Met in 2001, which included 7 paintings and 2 works on paper by the artist.

“Friedrich's art evokes a watershed moment in the development of human understanding of the natural world,” said Alison Hokanson, Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Met, and co- curator of the exhibition. “His landscapes mark the rise of the Romantic entwinement of nature and the self—a sensibility that intersected with the start of the industrial revolution and the growth of what we now call ecological awareness. Looking at his work, we can discern the beginnings of an experience of nature that is still with us.”

“The pictorial language that Friedrich and his fellow Romantics developed to express a connection with nature is deeply ingrained in how we see and represent the world, both in art and in popular visual culture,” says Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Met, and co-curator of the exhibition. “We invite audiences to explore Friedrich’s landscapes as they would have been understood in the artist’s own time and to consider their resonance today, when the environment is at the forefront of cultural and political discourse.”

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature will present 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 (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), two icons 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 domestic and international collections will showcase Friedrich’s talents as a draftsman and the centrality of drawing to his creative practice. The assortment illuminates the ways the artist worked across media and how different materials and techniques shaped his style. Paintings and drawings by Friedrich’s compatriots Johan Christian Dahl, Carl Gustav Carus, August Heinrich, and others will delineate his artistic context. These works, almost entirely drawn from The Met’s collection, highlight the strength of the northern Romantic holdings that the Museum has amassed in the past 35 years, an uncommon strength among institutions in the United States.

Exhibition Overview

The exhibition will unfold chronologically and thematically, tracing Friedrich’s portrayal of the landscape in and around present-day Germany over his four-decade career. His lifetime coincided with pronounced symbolic and physical changes to the land, resulting from the rise of Romantic thought, scientific discoveries about the earth, nascent industrialization, political upheaval, and war. Each section of the exhibition will examine specific motifs and pictorial strategies that defined Friedrich’s art and investigate the themes that he explored, among them spirituality and religion; the experience of the infinite and unknowable; the passage of time and mortality; solitude and companionship in nature; the juxtaposition of the familiar and the unknown; and the mixture of beauty and danger that the Romantics called the sublime.

The exhibition begins with Friedrich’s first years in Dresden, a flourishing cultural center and hotbed of early Romantic thought. Working primarily as a draftsman and printmaker, he searched widely for his creative path, experimenting with different styles and techniques. Friedrich’s early works, grounded in his practice of drawing outside, reveal his evolving visualization of the natural world as a site of emotional experience and his increasingly unconventional approach to perspective and composition.

The next gallery highlights the period between 1803 and 1808, during which Friedrich made his professional breakthrough, submitting ambitious ink-wash drawings to public exhibitions in Dresden and Weimar. Works like View of Arkona with Rising Moon (The Albertina Museum, Vienna) elicited substantial critical attention both for their technical virtuosity and their alignment with the Romantic taste for mood and mystery. Depicting the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, this spectacular drawing deploys the spare coastal landscape to evoke solitude, melancholy, and longing.

Having made his name as a draftsman, Friedrich began, in about 1807, to focus much of his energy on oil painting. Many of his early paintings, made amid the instability and violence that engulfed German lands during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), depict emblems of suffering and consolation: Christian crosses, crucifixes, and long abandoned Catholic monasteries, common to German terrain. Friedrich invigorated his subjects with manipulations of perspective and atmosphere that emphasize the wonder and yearning of a personal journey of belief. The artist’s portrayals of the landscape as a site of sacred encounter made his art a flashpoint in culture-wide clashes over religious doctrine and new notions of spiritual life. One of his most extraordinary meditations on faith is Monk by the Sea (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). This radically minimalist composition evokes, in Friedrich’s own words “the unknowable hereafter… the darkness of the future! Which is only ever sacred intuition, to be seen and recognized only in belief.”

Although solitude—an experience poignantly depicted in Monk by the Sea—is an important theme in Friedrich’s art, his creative practice unfolded amid a community of friends and family. The Dresden Academy of Art, where he became a member and later a professor, attracted like-minded peers and pupils with whom he explored the landscape and exchanged ideas and methods. The companionship that shaped Friedrich’s art is documented in drawings made while sketching side by side with other artists and commemorated in such paintings as The Met’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon.

During the later 1810s and the 1820s, the overt religious symbols that dominated Friedrich’s early work gave way to imagery imbued with broader spiritual associations. During this period, Friedrich painted numerous scenes inspired by the geography and daily life of places well known to him. The artist’s seascapes and cityscapes explore the dialogue between familiar, routine existence and distant, unknown realms. Encapsulating this dynamic is Moonrise over the Sea (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), in which figures onshore gaze across an expanse of water toward incoming ships and, beyond them, the horizon. In yet other works, among them Woman before a Rising or Setting Sun (Museum Folkwang, Essen), Friedrich evokes the promise of communion with nature.

The next section of the exhibition explores Friedrich’s interest in the passage of time. Depictions of the seasons, such as Dolmen in Autumn (Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), conjoin nature’s cycles with the rhythms of human life and history. Friedrich was particularly intrigued by winter, creating numerous works that capture the season’s subtle colors and evoke its mingled associations with death and rebirth. Similarly, the artist’s dazzling watercolors of centuries-old castles, overgrown with greenery, memorialize human endeavor and mourn its ephemerality. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and amid unfulfilled aspirations for a unified Germany, these vestiges of the past became emblems of modern political hopes and disappointments.

The Romantic era ushered in a new appreciation for mountains as sites of beauty and grandeur and emblems of the immense power and age of the earth. Friedrich responded to the period’s surging interest in the sights and sensations of high elevations in The Watzmann (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; loaned by Deka, Frankfurt am Main), a monumental painting of a peak in the Alps that he depicted in eye-catching detail, despite never seeing it firsthand. It was precisely the might of the mountains that appealed to the Romantics; to them, lofty peaks offered an encounter with the sublime—a mixture of beauty, danger, awe, and exultation that is given iconic form in Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Hamburger Kunsthalle).

In the later 1820s and early 1830s, public taste shifted away from Friedrich’s introspective, enigmatic landscapes in favor of a more direct manner of representation. Although the artist’s reputation waned, he remained true to his principles. Structuring his compositions around broad swaths of land, water, and sky crisply rendered but reduced in detail—he imbued his late canvases, among them The Evening Star (Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe Museum, Frankfurt am Main), with striking visual rhythms. In this period, Friedrich set his creative philosophy on paper, writing: “The task of a work of art is to recognize the spirit of nature and, with one’s whole heart and intention, to saturate oneself with it and absorb it and give it back again in the form of a picture.” The intimate connection that Friedrich perceived between the individual and the natural world is exemplified by The Stages of Life (Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig), in which the group of people on the shore, the ships on the water, and the vivid sky suggest a poignant meditation on family, mortality, and generational continuity.

Closing the exhibition is a gallery devoted to Friedrich’s final years. Although his work had largely fallen out of favor and the effects of a stroke made it difficult for him to paint, Friedrich’s creative drive remained undiminished. Returning to ink-wash as his primary creative vehicle, he dedicated himself to depictions of graveyards, ancient tombs, and empty seashores, images that reflect a broad philosophical interest in death and whatever may lie beyond it. These late works are a powerful capstone to the body of landscape he had produced over the previous four decades—a visionary evocation of humanity’s complex relationship with the living earth.

As a whole, the exhibition will distill Friedrich’s vision of nature and situate his art within the tumultuous politics and vibrant culture of 19th-century German society, illuminating the role of Romanticism in shaping modern perceptions of the natural world.