노년 남성의 초상

Caspar David Friedrich is remembered for lonely landscapes, small figures gazing at mountains and misty seas, so a plain portrait like this one is a rarity in his work. The old man is thought to be the painter's own father, Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, a candle and soap maker in the Baltic town of Greifswald. It was painted around 1809, near the end of the father's life. These were loud years for the artist. Shortly before, his Cross in the Mountains, a landscape hung as a church altarpiece, had set off a public quarrel over whether mere scenery could carry religious meaning at all. This sober study of a lined old face belongs to the opposite corner of his life, the family he had grown up among on the Baltic coast.