In the winter of 1820/21 Friedrich noticed drifting ice floes on the River Elbe. Fascinated by this rare weather phenomenon, he sketched three oil studies of ice floes (Hamburger Kunsthalle). A few years later, these outdoor sketches became the basis for one of his most famous paintings, The Sea of Ice, but now he scaled the ice floes to monumental proportions.

The Sea of Ice is an exceptionally well-preserved painting. Even after two centuries, the colors are still vibrant and the layers of paint have largely adhered to the support. However, the slightest disturbance or touch could stress or damage the painting, which is why the work is rarely loaned today. For example, cracks in the paint could occur – so-called craquelure. Here you can see a spike-shaped craquelure, probably caused by pressure the back of the canvas.

There are also some blue dots – coarser particles of the blue pigment that Friedrich used for the sky. His blue of choice was smalt, a pigment made from ground blue cobalt glass. Smalt was cheaper than indigo or ultramarine, for example, but can turn brown over time. You can see how carefully the artist applied the color by the way the pinkish ground layer shows through, revealing subtle gradations of color. This is not particularly noticeable when looking at the painting as a whole, but it gives the sky a shimmering glow typical for Friedrich.

Im Original ist das Tauwerk mit bloßem Auge kaum zu erkennen.
Als Mann von der Küste zeichnete Friedrich in seinem Leben eine ganze Reihe von Schiffen, die häufig auch in seinen Gemälden auftauchen.

In the original painting, the ship’s rigging is barely visible to the naked eye.
Having grown up on the coast, Friedrich drew lots of ships in his life, many of which also appeared in his paintings.

Are these logs, or tree trunks, or ship masts? How could they have got there?
If you look closely, you will notice that one of the crushed logs is reflected in the edge of the ice.

Which color did Friedrich apply first? The white of the snow-covered floe or the brown of the cracked sheet of ice behind it?
It is hard to tell because neither color covers the other. They don’t even touch. The brownish ground layer that shows through the surface paint creates a sense of three-dimensionality.
Small dark dots are visible where the brown and white strokes meet. These are the last traces of the preliminary drawing, a design outline or ‘underdrawing’ that helped Friedrich to realize the composition on the canvas.

Friedrich often used motifs once observed several times. Thus his imagination brought forth varying compositions derived from the same visual source. Around 1822/24, Friedrich created several Nordic landscapes, such as Reef by the Seashore (Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe). The rugged outlines of the rock formation can also be found here in The Sea of Ice.
Don’t they also remind you of sleeping dragons?

As bleak, hopeless and devastating as the scene may seem, Friedrich includes a ray of hope – showing that every cloud has a silver lining.
The painter obviously knew then what today’s mindfulness guides preach: There is a way out of every situation, no matter how hopeless, it’s all a matter of perspective.

Caspar David Friedrich himself never saw the polar ice. But, in 1821/22, he witnessed ice floes on the frozen Elbe. His painter friend Carl Gustav Carus wrote about this natural spectacle on January 14, 1821:

“In the end, the force of the current on the far side of the river shifted the masses of ice on the near side, and great floes majestically thrust their way up the Elbberg shore, like petrified ocean breakers. […]
To take a closer look at those masses of ice, I went out to the Elbberg. There I stood near the ice sheets that had recently come ashore. They were half a foot to a foot-and-a-half thick; their color was yellowish in parts, and a translucent greenish blue elsewhere; they were four, six, and up to eight feet wide. […] Beyond, the river surged on its way, casting up a second mass of ice floes on the projecting bank opposite.”
Carl Gustav Carus, Ein Bild vom Aufbruch des Eises bei Dresden, quoted in: Richter 2024, p. 448. (note 36: CGC, Briefe und Aufsätze über Landschaftsmalerei, Leipzig und Weimar 1982, p. 111, abbreviated).

Carl Gustav Carus, ‘A Picture of the Breaking of the Ice on the River Elbe in Dresden’, in: Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, Getty Publications 2002, p. 146 (abbreviated), Trans.: David Britt.

To give the painting a sense of depth, Friedrich used a simple trick: he made elements further in the background less detailed than those in the foreground, making them appear blurred. The illusion of depth is created because the visual cortex assembles the pictorial object from all the fine brushstrokes on the blue-on-blue horizon.

The white edge of the canvas stands out beyond the painted image. This is not an exposed ground, but a second canvas. It was used to permanently stabilize the original canvas on which Friedrich had painted. In 1938, a paintings conservator from the Hamburger Kunsthalle carried out a so-called ‘lining’. This involves removing the original canvas from the wooden stretcher and cutting it to the edge of the painted image. It is then attached to a second, modern piece of canvas prepared with glue and primer. The painting is now ‘lined’.
This treatment is rarely used today because the risk is too great that the adhesives may later cause chemical reactions that could damage the layers of paint.

How does the frame change the effect of a painting?
For over a century, the painting had a dark-stained frame with a narrow gold border. It has only recently been replaced by a period giltwood frame. Such frames were common in Friedrich’s lifetime, while the dark frame probably originated when the painting was acquired by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1905 and corresponded with early 20th-century tastes.

The camera adjusted, constant studio lighting and the painting on a movable frame that allows precise horizontal and vertical movements: these are the ideal conditions for creating an ultra-high-resolution photograph. To create a so-called Gigapixel image, photographer Christoph Irrgang captured the painting in a fixed grid of 6 x 6 images with defined overlaps. He then meticulously merged these 36 individual photos digitally to create an image around 60,000 pixels wide.

The highest resolution image of The Sea of Ice ever made is now freely available to all. Have fun discovering it!

… the Yeti?! Unlikely. Nor is it Frankenstein’s monster who Mary Shelley sent to the North Pole in her gothic novel of 1818.
This is a former area of abrasion and paint loss, barely noticeable after retouching.

Thick, frozen snow, translucent ice, light reflections, dark shadows: in his handling, Friedrich treated each surface differently. Sometimes he applied paint generously and impasto, sometimes with a barely loaded brush, letting the pinkish-red ground layer shine through in places.

1823/24 the artist Caspar David Friedrich this picture. It is called The Sea of Ice.

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