Mountain Landscape with Rainbow

Mountain Landscape with Rainbow is a breathtaking landscape painting by Caspar David Friedrich.

The artist produced one of his most impactful artworks in the early 19th century, which features a bright rainbow which curves over a darkened landscape below. The emotion of this piece perfectly captures the Romanticist era, and Friedrich would become known as one of its finest exponents.

Description

We find a particularly imposing sky in the background, with a small hill placed centrally. A rainbow spreads right across the composition and is intended to essentially provide the dimensions to the piece.

The figure close to us is surrounded by a series of trees and bushes that are predominantly darkened, but with just a few in lighter tones so that we can understand what we are looking at. Smaller ridges are then placed either side of the largest hill in order to complete a natural looking setting. This is one of several darkened landscape paintings by Friedrich who was intending to capture the dramatic nature of these conditions.

The artist carefully provides a spotlight which falls around the figure in the foreground, allowing us to see more detail of them. The mountain behind is also carefully arrangeed to have its peak central to the composition, and just below the highest point of the rainbow. This perfection of layout could only be possible where an artist uses his imagination rather than precisely depicting something from the real world.

Friedrich is famous for his use of single figures looking out across great expanses of land, and this became a signature of his career. In some cases, though, he would remove humanity entirely, such as when focusing on a single decaying tree, or other element from nature. He could find beauty in anything, and increase its visual strengths by appending his own emotions to it.

Painting Detail

Mountain Landscape with Rainbow can be found at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. The oil on canvas measures 70 cm × 102 cm (27.5 in × 40.1 in) and was completed by Caspar David Friedrich during the period of 1809–10.

Symbolic Meaning

Friedrich again uses human figures to underline the greatness of the natural world, reminding us at just how small and unimportant we all are in the grand scheme of things.

Friedrich was one of many talented European Romanticist artists, but perhaps the only one to consistently use this technique of adding people into the foreground of his landscape paintings. He adored the countryside and wanted others to see its beauty, just as he did. His style attempted to take reality and add to it with his own emotions, this was Romanticism.

Aesthetic Pleasure

The result of this combination were charming scenes which promoted the German landscape and provide calming scenes to those who appreciate art from a purely aesthetic angle. In Mountain Landscape with Rainbow the artist uses a particularly dramatic set of lighting that focuses the eye on the individual figure in the foreground, in fact it is so abrupt that it is almost in the realms of Rembrandt or Caravaggio who did similar with their portraiture.