"The picture [Friedrich's painting: 'The Cross on the Baltic Sea' ] for your friend has already been sketched out, but there is no church in it, not a single tree or plant, not a blade of grass. On a bare and rocky seashore there stands, high up, the cross - for those who see it that way, a consolation, and for those who don't see it that way, just a cross."
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Quote from Friedrich's letter to Louise Seidler, 1815; as cited in Romanticism and realism : the mythology of nineteenth-century art - (from Chapter: Friedrich and the language of Landscape), Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner; Viking Press, New York, 1984, p. 63
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich
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Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th century German painter, considered by many critics to be one of the f
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