The Lonely Tree | |
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German: Der einsame Baum | |
Artist | Caspar David Friedrich |
Year | 1822 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 55 cm × 71 cm (22 in × 28 in) |
Location | Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
The Lonely Tree (German: Der einsame Baum, sometimes translated as "The Solitary Tree") is an 1822 oil-on-canvas painting by German painter Caspar David Friedrich. It measures 55 × 71 centimetres (22 × 28 in). The work depicts a panoramic view of a romantic landscape of plains with mountains in the background. A solitary oak tree dominates the foreground.
An ancient oak stands at the centre of the painting, clearly damaged but still standing. The tree's branches, dark in silhouette, project into the largely overcast morning sky. Banks of cloud seem to form a dome above the tree. The crown of the tree is dead, and the top of its trunk and two truncated branches resemble a cross. A shepherd shelters under the leaf-bearing lower branches. His flock of sheep graze beside a pond in the wide grassy meadow around the tree. In the middle distance, villages and a town nestle among other trees and bushes. Tree-clad hills pile up into blue-grey mountains in the background.
The work was commissioned by banker and art collector Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener, together with a second painting Moonrise by the Sea (Mondaufgang am Meer) to create a pair of "times of the day", depicting morning and evening landscape scenes, in a tradition of Claude Lorrain. It was completed before November 1822 and has been held by the Berlin National Gallery since 1861, donated by Wagener as part of its founding collection. It is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin.
Art historian Helmut Börsch-Supan has suggested that the mountains are in the Riesengebirge, now in the Czech Republic, which historically divided Silesia and Bohemia, southeast of Dresden, where Friedrich settled in 1798. Friedrich painted the mountains several times between 1806 and 1810. The double peak may be Jeschken.
The painting has drawn a number of interpretations. Ludwig Justi sees the old oak as a symbol of the German people, rooted in the landscape; Jens Christian Jensen sees it as a link between the past and the present; and Charlotte Margarethe de Prybram-Gladona sees it as a symbol of loneliness.
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Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise over the Sea (Mondaufgang am Meer), 1822, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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Caspar David Friedrich, Morgen im Riesengebirge, 1810–11
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Photograph of the landscape in the Riesengebirge, including a view of Jeschken
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Friedrich, The Lone Tree
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Lonely Tree Soundsystem
Transcription
(lively music) Steven: When we think of 19th Century landscape painting, we so often think of an artist painting plein air, that is, painting outside, before the landscape, but that wasn't always the case. In the work of Caspar David Friedrich, his paintings were studio paintings. They were inventions, to a very great extentent, and that's certainly the case of The Lone Tree. Beth: Right. He did studies outside, in pencil, and then would compose a painting in his studio. Steven: It makes sense that these would be studio works because Friedrich was using landscape to portray deeper ideas, deeper meanings. Beth: This symbolic landscape includes a lone tree. Steven: And what a tree it is: gnarled, anthropomorphic. Beth: It's brooming towards its bottom, and we can see a shepherd underneath it, gazing at his flock. As it rises up, it seems to struggle, as though its top has been blasted off by lightning or a terrible storm, and it's struggling to just eck out a few leaves towards its top. Steven: It stands like a lone sentinel. It is ancient. Friedrich is creating this contrast between the ephemeral state of that shepherd, that one man's life, what, 70-80 years, as opposed to the thousand-year-old tree that had stood here through wars and storms. Beth: We're certainly meant to look at the top of that tree, the utmost beam part, where Friedrich has parted the mountains and given us an expanse of blue sky. That's the place where Friedrich directs our gaze. Steven: Is it me, or am I seeing a kind of cruciform? Organic, but nevertheless, a reference to the cross. Beth: I think that's very likely there. And we see a church rising above a small town. Steven: But that church is tiny compared to the cathedral that is this tree. Beth: That is, nature. Steven: Friedrich is pointing us to a kind of older spirituality. It's so interesting, when we think about traditional or [classisized] landscapes, say from the Baroque, we might think of the work of Claude Lorrain, who had so carefully constructed a kind of system or formula for the representation of landscape in which trees function as a kind of curtain that is pulled aside to draw us into a deeper landscape, that is, trees frame the image, they frame the deep lanscape. Friedrich has done the reverse here. He's made the tree the main protagonist. The open spaces function as the frame for the tree. It is this move away from classisizing, although I do want to note that the idea of the shepherd and the sheep is very much a classical element that we might find in a Claude. Beth: But it's also a Christian element, a shepherd and his flock. Steven: Finding shelter under that ancient tree. But, even given that cruciform, there's a sense that maybe this tree is even older, that it has a primordial spirituality. Perhaps it had witnessed the Druidic traditions. This tree is the link back to a past that is awe-inspiring in its ability to resist the forces of nature, the forces of man, the march of time. (lively music)
See also
References
- Der einsame Baum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
- Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers, p. 38-39
- Caspar David Friedrich, Solitary Tree (Village Landscape in Morning Light) (1822), German History in Documents and Images