Caspar David Friedrich
The Soul of Nature
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
February 8 - May 11, 2025
The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). 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 European 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. As a capstone to this series of shows, The Met’s exhibition features unprecedented loans from all three institutions and from more than 30 other public and private lenders in Europe and North America, many never before seen in the United States. Despite Friedrich’s celebrated reputation, 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.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature presents oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches from every phase of the artist’s career, along with select examples by his contemporaries. The selection illuminates Caspar David 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 are exhibited for the first time in the United States are Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Hamburger Kunsthalle) and Monk by the Sea (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie), two of Friedrich’s most famous paintings and 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 also brings together for the first time all five of the Caspar David 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 showcases Friedrich’s talents as a draftsman and the centrality of drawing to his creative practice. As a joint project between specialists in paintings and drawings, the exhibition also considers the ways that the artist worked across media and how different materials and techniques shaped his style.
The exhibition unfolds chronologically and thematically, tracing Friedrich’s portrayal of the landscape of northern and central Europe over his four-decade career, which coincided with pronounced symbolic and physical changes to the land—prompted by the rise of Romantic thought, scientific discoveries about the earth, nascent industrialization, and political upheaval, most notably the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–1815. Each section of the exhibition will examine specific landscape motifs and pictorial strategies that defined Friedrich’s art, while highlighting 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. As a whole, the exhibition distills 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 German Romanticism in shaping modern perceptions of the natural world.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature is co-curated by Alison Hokanson (Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Met), and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein (Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Met).
The Soul of Nature
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition. It will feature essays by Dr. Hokanson and Dr. Seidenstein; Professor Joseph Leo Koerner, Harvard University; and Professor Cordula Grewe, Indiana University; in addition to contributions from other international scholars. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art it is distributed by Yale University Press.
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
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