Caspar David Friedrich at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

Independently of its permanent collection, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum regularly organises temporary exhibition programmes. Now its guest work is Oak in the Snow by Caspar David Friedrich.

Caspar David Friedrich began his art training in his hometown of Greifswald, then part of Sweden, with the university teacher of drawing Johann Gottfried Quistorp. In 1794, he continued his studies at the Academy of the Fine Arts of Copenhagen. In 1798 he moved to Dresden, where he was to remain, except for the occasional journey to northern Germany and to Bohemia. In 1810 he was admitted as a member of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and from 1824 taught at the Dresden Academy.

This small painting shows a clearly delimited fragment of a landscape. In a snow-covered meadow stands a gnarly oak, its lower branches spreading out to the edges of the image. In the background is the edge of a wood, and in the foreground a small pool on the edge of which lie two dead boughs. The grey of the sky is clearly wintry; only in the upper part of the painting are fragments of blue sky to be seen.


Date: through July 8.
Location: Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao. Plaza, 2. 48009 Bilbao, Spain.
Opening hours: from Monday to Sunday from 10am to 8pm.

Enjoy other works by Friedrich in our Great Masters section