Editing Caspar David Friedrich (section)

===Marriage===
[[File:Caspar David Friedrich's Chalk Cliffs on Rügen.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|left|''[[Chalk Cliffs on Rügen]]'' (1818). 90.5 × 71&nbsp;cm. Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten, [[Winterthur]], Switzerland. Friedrich married Christiane Caroline Bommer in 1818, and on their honeymoon they visited relatives in [[Neubrandenburg]] and [[Greifswald]]. This painting celebrates the couple's union.{{sfn|Vaughan|2004|p=203}}]]

On 21 January 1818, Friedrich married {{ill|Caroline Friedrich|lt=Caroline Bommer|de|Caroline Friedrich}}, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a [[dye]]r from Dresden.{{sfn|Vaughan|1980|p=101}} The couple had three children, with their first, Emma, arriving in 1820. {{ill|Adolf Friedrich (painter)|lt=Gustav Adolf|de|Adolf Friedrich (Maler)|}}, their third child, was named after Swedish King [[Gustavus Adolphus]], and became a notable painter in his own right.{{cn|date=May 2025}}

[[Physiologist]] and painter [[Carl Gustav Carus]] notes in his biographical essays that marriage did not impact significantly on either Friedrich's life or personality, yet his canvasses from this period, including ''[[Chalk Cliffs on Rügen]]''—painted after his honeymoon—display a new sense of levity, while his palette is brighter and less austere.{{sfn|Börsch-Supan|1974|pp=41–45}} Human figures appear with increasing frequency in the paintings of this period, which Siegel interprets as a reflection that "the importance of human life, particularly his family, now occupies his thoughts more and more, and his friends, his wife, and his townspeople appear as frequent subjects in his art."{{sfn|Siegel|1978|p=114}}

Around this time, he found support from two sources in Russia. In 1820, the Grand Duke [[Nicholas I of Russia|Nikolai Pavlovich]], at the behest of his wife [[Alexandra Feodorovna (Charlotte of Prussia)|Alexandra Feodorovna]], visited Friedrich's studio and returned to [[Saint Petersburg]] with a number of his paintings, an exchange that began a patronage that continued for many years.<ref>[[John Updike|Updike, John]]. "[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1991/mar/07/innerlichkeit-and-eigentumlichkeit/ Innerlichkeit and Eigentümlichkeit]". ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', Volume 38, Number 5, 7 March 1991. Retrieved on 22 October 2008.</ref> Not long thereafter, the poet [[Vasily Zhukovsky]], tutor to the Grand Duke's son (later [[Alexander II of Russia|Tsar Alexander II]]), met Friedrich in 1821 and found in him a kindred spirit. For decades Zhukovsky helped Friedrich both by purchasing his work himself and by recommending his art to the royal family; his assistance toward the end of Friedrich's career proved invaluable to the ailing and impoverished artist. Zhukovsky remarked that his friend's paintings "please us by their precision, each of them awakening a memory in our mind."{{sfn|Vaughan|1980|p=66}}

Friedrich was acquainted with [[Philipp Otto Runge]], another leading German painter of the Romantic period. He was also a friend of [[Georg Friedrich Kersting]], and painted him at work in his unadorned studio, and of the Norwegian painter [[Johan Christian Clausen Dahl]] (1788–1857). Dahl was close to Friedrich during the artist's final years, and he expressed dismay that to the art-buying public, Friedrich's pictures were only "curiosities".{{sfn|Schmied|1995|p=48}} While the poet Zhukovsky appreciated Friedrich's psychological themes, Dahl praised the descriptive quality of Friedrich's landscapes, commenting that "artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of [[Mysticism|mystic]], because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic&nbsp;... They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented".{{sfn|Vaughan|1980|p=66}}