Shop art print and framed art The Polar Sea by Caspar David Friedrich

The Sea of Ice (German: Das Eismeer) is a picture painted by Caspar David Friedrich in 1823-1824 and housed in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany. Along with The Traveller Contemplating a Sea of Clouds (1818), it is one of the artist's most famous works. The double title of The Sea of Ice or Shipwreck is a reference to this painting and to another lost painting by the artist, but with a similar theme. The painting depicts a frozen sea. The blocks of ice that make up the sea protrude towards the sky, while presenting a sharp appearance. The stern of a wooden ship caught in this sea of ice is visible. This is the HMS Griper, one of the two ships William Edward Parry sailed in 1819-1820 on an Arctic expedition in search of the Northwest Passage that inspired Friedrich. The composition, classic but tormented, plunges the viewer into the middle of this crashing ice. Friedrich used many of the classic destabilising devices in his work, such as the contrast in scale and the opposition between difficulty of reading and finesse of detail. The painting bears witness to the ambiguity of Friedrich's painting, oscillating between landscape and history. However, here the story is really a pretext for depicting a striking landscape"; the motif thus relegates the subject to the background, illustrating Friedrich's research into the predominance of landscape". Friedrich often referred to death in his paintings, but The Sea of Ice is one of the few works in which he depicts a scene of [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the classical period. It belongs to the romanticism style.

 

Find the full description of The Polar Sea by Caspar David Friedrich on Wikipedia.