1803
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Footbridge with Cross before Trees at a River is a 1803 by Caspar David Friedrich, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This painting shows a small footbridge and a cross in front of trees near a river. The artist used fine lines to draw the landscape and broad strokes for the sky. This creates a nice contrast between the detailed land and the soft horizon. The artist also made the people in the scene very small, which makes the natural world seem big. You can learn more about the artist's use of contrast by looking into the technique of chiaroscuro.
Landscape was Caspar David Friedrich’s preferred subject, and for him spending time outdoors was a religious and transcendent experience. Here, the artist presented the terrain of Northern Germany as expansive and emphasized the smallness of man next to God’s creation. The fine, dense etched lines used to depict the landscape are juxtaposed with the broad strokes that make up the sky and horizon. Friedrich experimented with printmaking for only five years, and this print is one of just a few existing impressions.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Caspar David Friedrich (German: ; 5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic, and anti-classical…
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