The Networks 334 Linda Alpermann CAROLINE BARDUA (1781–1864) In the winter of 1839, Caroline Bardua, the Ballenstedt-born painter of portraits and historical scenes, captured a visibly aged Caspar David Friedrich in her portrait of the artist (fig. 1). It shows the artist slumped in a chair, his gaze averted from the viewer while staring into the distance. The background is dominated by a window overlooking a bridge over the Elbe, framed by willow branches. Friedrich is depicted wearing a fur-trimmed coat over a white shirt. Behind him is an empty canvas, and in front of him are an unused palette and cleaned brushes. The blank canvas and untouched painting utensils may indicate his creative inertia, while the painter himself looks weak and tired.1 The portrait was painted a few months before his death. Bardua had visited Friedrich in August 1839 after a long absence from Dresden. Four years earlier, the artist had suffered a severe stroke and must have appeared gravely ill during her visit. In a letter, Caroline Bardua’s sister, Wilhelmine, wrote: “Caroline found her old friend Caspar Friedrich completely broken and ill. She now calls on him every morning to paint him.”2 The painting was exhibited at the Berlin Art Academy in the autumn of 1840 and because Friedrich had died in May of that year, it attracted a great deal of interest.3 It is worth comparing this picture with Bardua’s first portrait of Friedrich of 1810 (fig. 2).4 That painting shows the still sprightly 36-year-old painter at half-length, in front of a seascape with chalk cliffs in the distance. Friedrich faces the viewer in three-quarter profile. He looks serious and attentive and is dressed in a dark overcoat with a high collar that sets off his striking reddish-blonde muttonchops and accentuates his pale face, which catches the light. The stark contrast of light and dark between Friedrich’s face and the rest of the picture, as well as the Neoclassical composition, give Friedrich an almost heroic quality. His half-turn towards a seascape, presumably the Baltic, refers to his birthplace and his closeness to nature.5 Friedrich wears a black armband on his left arm in memory of his father, who had died the year before. A comparison of the 1810 and 1839 portraits reveals not only the artist’s worn appearance, marked by age and illness in the later portrait, but also the change in Bardua’s approach to composition and style over the intervening three decades. The heroicising, 1 Caroline Bardua Portrait of the Painter Caspar David Friedrich 1839 | CAT 209
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