Collection: German Romanticism

German Romanticism took shape in the first decades of the nineteenth century in Dresden, Berlin, and Munich. It absorbed the philosophical seriousness of contemporary German literature, particularly the writings of Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and Goethe, into a programme of landscape and figure painting concerned with introspection, nature as moral presence, and Christian or pantheist allegory.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) is the central figure. His Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and Monk by the Sea fixed the canonical image of the contemplative figure before vast nature. Philipp Otto Runge developed a parallel symbolic programme; Carl Gustav Carus extended Friedrich's landscape into a more clinical, observational mode. Carl Blechen, Joseph Anton Koch, Johan Christian Dahl, Adrian Ludwig Richter, Carl Rottmann, and Carl Spitzweg populate the wider field.

The Nazarene movement, founded in 1809 by Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr in Vienna and continued in Rome, gave the religious wing of German Romanticism its most public form, with Peter von Cornelius and Wilhelm von Schadow as later members. The architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel produced the Berlin civic and religious buildings of the period.