Friedrich, lonely and old, but what wonderful dreams
“I lost a ship in the Baltic Sea,” the Bee Gees sang, “I’m on an iceberg running free.” Caspar Friedrich’s “The Stages of Life” – same sentiment, different century.
Click the detail to see whole painting.
The man in the top hat is perhaps being protective of his family, but then again maybe he’s not so altruistic. Maybe he knows that the old man appoaching him is his own death.
I’m not at all sure whether Caspar David Friedrich even intended the younger man’s raised arm to be a warning, a caution to his elder to keep his distance. It could be a man welcoming his father’s approach. But the evidence suggests otherwise.
This is the shore near the harbour of Greifswald, in Germany’s old Pomerania region on the Baltic Sea. Greifswald is where Friedrich was born on September 5, 1774, when it belonged to Sweden. That’s why the children in the painting are holding a Swedish flag.
The children are Friedrich’s own, Agnes and Gustav, as is the young woman, his elder daughter Emma. The man in the top hat is his nephew. The old man is Caspar Friedrich himself, with his back turned to us, like so many others in Friedrich’s art, a moody mannerism in painting that the symbolists called rueckenfigur. Five people, five ships.
He was 61 when he painted “The Stages of Life” in 1835, the same year he had a stroke that paralysed his right hand. Totting up his life’s cruel fortunes at a health resort at Teplitz, he must have seen the end coming. Death was approaching. His ship was sailing out to the far horizon.
Two years later he suffered a second stroke that seized almost all of his movement. Now he had only three years left. Another ship setting sail. Its mast looked like a crucifix. See the rest.
