Famous German Paintings: 8 Works from Dürer to Franz Marc

Famous German paintings begin with Albrecht Dürer's head-on self-portrait of 1500 and run through Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, Lucas Cranach's The Fountain of Youth, Tischbein's Goethe and Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog to Franz Marc's Blue Horse I of 1911. Read in date order, the eight make a short history of German art, and they hold their own beside the most famous paintings in the world.

Every date, size and location below comes from the museum that owns the painting. For the neighbors, our guides to famous Spanish paintings and Dutch Golden Age paintings cover Madrid and Amsterdam.

At a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Where to see it
1	Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe	Albrecht Dürer	1500	Alte Pinakothek, Munich
2	The Isenheim Altarpiece	Matthias Grünewald	1512–1516	Musée Unterlinden, Colmar
3	The Ambassadors	Hans Holbein the Younger	1533	National Gallery, London
4	The Fountain of Youth	Lucas Cranach the Elder	1546	Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
5	Goethe in the Roman Campagna	Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein	1787	Städel Museum, Frankfurt
6	The Monk by the Sea	Caspar David Friedrich	1808–1810	Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
7	Wanderer above the Sea of Fog	Caspar David Friedrich	c. 1817	Hamburger Kunsthalle
8	Blue Horse I	Franz Marc	1911	Lenbachhaus, Munich

The Renaissance: Dürer, Grünewald, Holbein and Cranach

01Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe, Albrecht Dürer (1500)

Dürer's self-portrait of 1500 is often called the Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight, after its inscription. The Alte Pinakothek in Munich, which bought it from Nuremberg in 1805, lists it as a limewood panel of 67.1 × 48.9 cm (26.4 × 19.3 in).

The museum translates the Latin as "I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg portrayed myself in appropriate colours aged twenty-eight years" and calls the picture probably the most unusual self-portrait in the history of art, for its frontality and its meticulous finish. Dürer took the formula from icons of Christ the Saviour, yet every detail belongs to one particular man. Our guide to famous self-portraits sets it beside Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

02The Isenheim Altarpiece, Matthias Grünewald (1512–1516)

Grünewald, whose real name was Mathis Gothart Nithart, was born in Würzburg and died in Halle in 1528. Between 1512 and 1516 he painted the panels of the Isenheim Altarpiece for the monastery of the Antonite order at Isenheim, about 15 miles south of Colmar, while Niclaus of Haguenau carved its sculpture. It stood on the high altar of the monastery hospital's chapel until the French Revolution, and since 1852 it has been the centerpiece of the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar.

The hospital explains the picture. The monks cared for victims of Saint Anthony's fire, a poisoning by ergot, a fungus that grows on rye, which caused gangrene of the hands and feet. On the altar of their chapel stood a Christ covered in wounds, his fingers twisted in pain. It is also one of the pictures in our list of the most famous paintings of Jesus.

03The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger (1533)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Holbein was born in Augsburg in the winter of 1497 to 1498 and spent two long periods in England, from 1526 to 1528 and from 1532 until his death in 1543, according to the National Gallery's biography. The Ambassadors comes from the second stay. It is oil on oak, 207 × 209.5 cm (81.5 × 82.5 in), so the two men stand close to life size. On the left is Jean de Dinteville, on his second diplomatic mission to England for Francis I of France; on the right, his friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur.

In 1533 Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn and broke with Rome, and the National Gallery reads the objects on the shelves as signs of that discord: a lute with a broken string, a flute case with one flute missing, a Lutheran hymn book, and an arithmetic book open at a page on division. A crucifix is half hidden behind the green curtain at top left. The skull across the floor, a memento mori, only comes into focus when you look up at the panel from the bottom right corner. Holbein seldom signed his work, but here he signed and dated it on the marble floor behind Dinteville, which the gallery takes as a sign of pride.

Dinteville did not enjoy the posting. In his surviving letters he called himself "the most melancholy, weary and wearisome ambassador that was ever seen."

04The Fountain of Youth, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1546)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Cranach was court painter to Elector Frederick the Wise, and his family workshop produced some 5,000 works over about eighty years, of which around 2,000 survive, according to the Cranach Foundation. The Fountain of Youth is one of the highlights of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin: a limewood panel of 122.5 × 186.5 cm (48.2 × 73.4 in).

Read it from left to right. Old women come down from a barren, rocky country in carts, on stretchers and on other people's backs, while a doctor gives his patient a last hopeless look. In the pool their wrinkles smooth out. On the right a gentleman leads them to a tent to be dressed, and then to dancing and a banquet in green meadows. Venus and Cupid stand on the fountain column.

Only women bathe. The museum's catalog text finds the answer in Rabelais, whose Pantagruel learns that old women are melted down and made young again, while old men grow young by keeping company with young women. Cranach's fountain is a fountain of love, an old legend turned ironic for the taste of his princely patrons, and it is the only large panel painting of the subject that the museum knows of.

The 18th century: Tischbein's Goethe

05Goethe in the Roman Campagna, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1787)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Goethe set out for Italy in September 1786, traveling incognito because he was already famous, and in Rome he stayed with his friend Tischbein. The two made an excursion to the ancient tombs of the Campagna, and Tischbein used that landscape as the stage for this portrait, oil on canvas, 166 × 210.3 cm (65.4 × 82.8 in), dated 1787. The Städel Museum in Frankfurt, which owns it, identifies the round tower behind him as the tomb of Caecilia Metella.

The Städel says no other portrait has shaped our image of Goethe as much as this one, which places him between antiquity and his own time. Then look at his feet. The museum points out an oddity that has never been explained: Goethe appears to have two left feet.

Romanticism: two by Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich (1774–1840) was born in Greifswald, studied at the academy in Copenhagen and settled in Dresden in 1798, according to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Two of his canvases appear among our 20 most famous landscape paintings, and our guide to Romantic landscape paintings follows him further, including The Sea of Ice.

06The Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich (1808–1810)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

The Monk by the Sea is oil on canvas, 110 × 171.5 cm (43.3 × 67.5 in), and belongs to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which shows it in the Alte Nationalgalerie with its companion, The Abbey in the Oakwood. Friedrich worked on it for two years, changing and overpainting it until only three bands were left (land, sea and sky) with one bare-headed monk and a few gulls.

Infrared images made during the 2013 to 2016 restoration show ships on the horizon in Friedrich's first underdrawing, which he later painted over, as the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin explain. As a painter, that is the detail I find most telling: the emptiness was taken out on purpose, not left blank.

At the urging of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the pair went to the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1810, where King Frederick William III of Prussia bought them, and the Academy made Friedrich a member the same year, according to the museums' Friedrich portal. On 13 October 1810 Heinrich von Kleist printed a response in his newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter, built on a review he had asked Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim to write and then cut and rewrote. Looking at the picture, Kleist wrote, feels "as if your eyelids have been cut away."

07Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1817)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

The Hamburger Kunsthalle dates the Wanderer to about 1817. It is oil on canvas, 94.8 × 74.8 cm (37.3 × 29.4 in), on permanent loan from the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, which acquired it in 1970. It is also one of the pictures in our guide to the 30 most famous paintings in the world.

The view is assembled, not observed. In the museums' catalog text, Markus Bertsch of the Kunsthalle traces the cone-shaped mountain at left to a study of the Rosenberg in Bohemian Switzerland from May 1808, notes that the Zirkelstein answers it on the right, and matches the rocks in the middle ground to an 1808 drawing of the Gamrig near Rathen. The walker's clothes mark him as a city dweller who has come out to look at nature, and there are no reliable clues to who he is.

Friedrich's figure seen from behind, the Rückenfigur, lets you stand where the walker stands. German History in Documents and Images suggests that no other image in the history of art has graced more dust jackets of books on the history, philosophy and literature of modernity.

Between Friedrich and Marc

Between the Romantics and the Expressionists, look for a small canvas in Munich. Carl Spitzweg's The Poor Poet (1839), oil on canvas, 36.2 × 44.6 cm (14.3 × 17.6 in), is one of his most popular works, according to the Bavarian State Painting Collections. A poet lies on a mattress in a cold attic, holds an umbrella against water dripping through the roof and keeps working on his verses, while his manuscripts wait by the stove as fuel. When it was first shown in Munich in 1839, critics objected to its ironic portrait of the poor poet. It hangs in the Sammlung Schack in Munich.

The 20th century: Der Blaue Reiter

Marc belonged to Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), the circle that came together in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and Marc himself and scattered when the First World War began in 1914. Its first exhibition opened at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich that winter.

08Blue Horse I, Franz Marc (1911)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Blue Horse I is oil on canvas, 112 × 84.5 cm (44.1 × 33.3 in), and came to the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1965 as a gift of the Bernhard and Elly Koehler Foundation. The museum, which holds the world's largest collection of Blue Rider art, describes a young foal full of strength, white showing through its angular body and dark navy in the hooves and mane, set among complementary contrasts: vermilion and green below, carmine and yellow, then violet, blue and orange above.

The colors follow a theory Marc set out in a letter to August Macke in December 1910: blue as the masculine principle, austere and spiritual; yellow as the feminine, gentle and cheerful; red as matter, brutal and heavy. The art historian Johannes Langner showed, the Lenbachhaus adds, that Marc gave many of his animals the poses of traditional figure painting, including Friedrich's figures absorbed in the view, which is why this foal seems lost in thought. The museum calls The Tower of Blue Horses, missing since the Second World War, the most complex form of that idea, while The Large Blue Horses (1911), 105.7 × 181.1 cm (41.6 × 71.3 in), has been at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis since 1942. The foal also closes our list of the most famous horse paintings.

Living with German painting

We paint all eight of these by hand in oil on canvas, from Dürer's fur-trimmed self-portrait to Friedrich's Wanderer. For other countries and centuries, our famous paintings page gathers the rest of the canon.

Sources

• Alte Pinakothek, Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe
• Musée Unterlinden, The Isenheim altarpiece
• National Gallery, London, Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors
• National Gallery, London, Hans Holbein the Younger (biography)
• Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Der Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth)
• Gemäldegalerie, Highlights of the Collection
• Cranach-Stiftung audio guide, The Cranach Serpent
• Städel Museum, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Goethe in the Roman Campagna
• National Gallery, London, Anton Raphael Mengs (biography)
• National Gallery, London, Johann Zoffany (biography)
• Hamburger Kunsthalle, Caspar David Friedrich
• Caspar David Friedrich portal (Hamburger Kunsthalle, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), Monk by the Sea
• Caspar David Friedrich portal, Heinrich von Kleist writing on the Monk by the Sea
• Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museumsjournal 2/2019, Mit dem Mönch am Meer
• Caspar David Friedrich portal, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
• German History in Documents and Images, Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog
• Neue Pinakothek, Carl Spitzweg, Der arme Poet
• Tate, German expressionism
• Tate, Brücke
• Tate, Der Blaue Reiter
• Lenbachhaus, Franz Marc, Blaues Pferd I
• Lenbachhaus, The Blue Rider
• Walker Art Center, Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses
• Hamburger Kunsthalle, New Caspar David Friedrich web portal