The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who is celebrated in these two books published to accompany the exhibitions in Hamburg and Berlin marking the 250th anniversary of his birth, has fascinated me all my life. When I was at school, his mysterious and emotive paintings started to appear on the covers of the grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics series: Abbey in the Oakwood on the cover of Hermann Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund; Woman at a Window (the woman’s back turned, one shutter open to the spring morning and the riverbank) on that of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. Covers featuring Sea of Ice, with its unfathomable grey-blue sky, and the yearning, autumnal Moonwatchers soon followed. Every image was memorable; every one hinted at emotional and spiritual depths embodied in northern European landscapes and places.

This fascination led me to attempt an undergraduate dissertation on the halted traveller in Romantic poetry and painting. I was following an intuition that Friedrich’s solitary figure in the storm-lit uplands of Mountain Landscape with Rainbow resonated with those moments of disquiet in Wordsworth’s Prelude that are perceptions of sublimity in nature shot through with loneliness and melancholy: ‘forlorn cascades/Among the windings of the mountain brooks’. A tutor reproved me for writing about a painter in relation to poetry, especially a painter tainted by fascist approval. I still think that I was onto something. 

The fair-haired traveller who, disconcertingly, turns his face away from the viewer in the rainbow painting is wonderfully contextualised by Friedrich’s self-portrait of 1802 and by friends’ drawings of Friedrich in the mountains on a sketching holiday around the same time. The individual in the drawings with the idiosyncratic haircut and travelling clothes seems a close match for the figure under the lightning-white rainbow, painted seven or eight years later. This deepens our apprehension of the painting as a record of the disquieted Romantic self, positioned in time through recollection of place and light.

These drawings are reproduced in Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes, the sumptuous book published to accompany the Berlin Alte Nationalgalerie exhibition of the same name, edited by Ralph Gleis and Birgit Verwiebe. Another major museum with remarkable holdings of Friedrich’s work, the Hamburg Kunsthalle, has helped produce Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age, edited by Markus Bertsch and Johannes Grave. Agreeably, two of the four editors have contributed to both books, as have a number of other experts, adding to the sense of a shared enterprise magnificently realised.

The book derived from the Berlin exhibition is extraordinary in itself – both a monograph and a creative work. With great subtlety, the artworks have been arranged into thematic categories: mountains, gorges, forests, coastlines and riverbanks, pairs of pictures, versions and copies, nature studies and outlines of figures. Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age is also thematically arranged and the categories and juxtapositions it offers are themselves poetic, as befits the most poetic of painters: ‘Landscapes with Human Traces: Religious and Political Meanings’; ‘Impenetrability: Nature as an Overpowering Force’; ‘Moods: Clouds, Fog, Light and the Play of Colors’.

Both books contain exceptionally interesting explorations of how the paintings were made, with expert analysis of everything from the weave of Friedrich’s canvases to his favoured colours, and how his choice of colours shifted as he grew older (he increasingly used synthetic chrome yellow for skies at sunset, and cobalt blue for twilight). There are a few real surprises from the analysis of his pictures, not least from the investigation of his underdrawings. Although there is little trace of them in the finished work, the waters in The Port of Greifswald (1818–20) were originally dense with little boats between the sailing ships. Even more astonishing, the storm-blue waters of the celebrated Monk by the Sea were originally populated by early 19th-century sailing ships. These were obliterated in the final painting to give us the familiar solitary figure, timeless against the stormy sea and empty shore.

Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes also offers a history of the interpretation of Friedrich’s work, written by Johannes Grave. In the third quarter of the 20th century, Helmut Börsch-­Supan’s notion that every element had a fixed meaning and that the pictures could be decoded by analysis of the combinations, as though we were back in the era of Baroque emblematics, prevailed. Every ray of light was supernatural, every mountaintop a paradise. This view has since been sensibly challenged, not least in an excellent monograph on Friedrich by Joseph Leo Koerner. Among much else, Koerner explains how the viewpoint affects the perceptions of the viewer, allowing the building of different emotional narratives. Unforgettably, in The Chasseur in the Forest the spectator is placed up a tree, given the viewpoint of a sniper.

Gleis and Verwiebe’s book confines itself mostly to works by Friedrich himself, though there are occasional discussions of works by inheritors of his innovations and portrait drawings by others. These include a picture of a watchful, greatcoated young artist (who looks considerably less manic than the figure in Friedrich’s self-portrait of the same year) produced in 1810 by Caroline Bardua and another of a wonderfully dignified mature man with a fur-trimmed coat, like a dignitary in Wagner’s Meistersinger, painted in 1836 by Carl Johann Baehr. These portraits emphasise Friedrich’s membership of a circle of like-minded artists and musicians in Dresden. The book by Bertsch and Grave includes a section entitled ‘Taking Friedrich Further’, which surveys these friends and contemporaries, especially the court physician Carl Gustav Carus, the medievalising mystic Ernst Ferdinand Oehme and the brilliant Norwegian-born painter Johan Christian Dahl. Friedrich’s pre-eminence is maintained, but Dahl could also produce intensely poetic records of the passing moment, such as his Two Church Towers in Copenhagen against the Evening Sky (1837), an extraordinary composition with the tops of two towers bottom right and the rest of the small canvas filled with filmy, restless clouds, saffron and grey, moving against the azure yellow of the sky the moment after sunset.

Friedrich’s Dresden circle staged plays and also experimented with the exhibition (with music) of transparent pictures lit from behind, sometimes with moving coloured lights to imitate, for instance, moonrise behind a ruined abbey. At least one transparent picture by Friedrich is reproduced in Gleis and Verwiebe’s book. This leads naturally to the prodigious light boxes, constructed as loving homages to Friedrich, by the contemporary Japanese artist Hiroyuki Masuyama, which feature in both books. It is heartening to see such a response from a distinguished contemporary artist. Masuyama has devised a flawless technique for assembling images from Friedrich’s work (sometimes subtly varied through the inclusion of modern figures or objects) out of multiple photographic shots. Particularly poignant and painterly in its execution is his reimagining of Friedrich’s The High Mountains (1824), a painting derived from a sketch by Carus, which was destroyed during the Second World War.

These fine books affirm that, 250 years after his birth, Caspar David Friedrich has an unassailable standing in Germany and internationally, his immersion in nature and season honoured anew by a generation acutely aware of the fragility of the environment. Both are rich in thoughtful and well-informed essays, both advance fascinating discoveries about the pigments and techniques that Friedrich used to produce his works, both offer plentiful material about Friedrich’s milieu and his reputation since his death. Together, they provide a resource for the study and appreciation of Friedrich’s art unlikely to be surpassed for a very long time. With their complementary fog-grey and twilight-blue spines, the two books look especially handsome together on the shelf.