CARSTENS, Asmus Jakob

(b. 1754 Sanct Gürgen, d. 1798 Roma)

Danish-born German draughtsman and painter. Apart from some initial training at the Copenhagen Academy he was largely self-educated. He moved to Berlin in 1787 and taught at the Academy. After 1792 he lived in Rome with the help of a grant from the Prussian State. Carstens was totally committed to Neoclassicism and concentrated on heroic figure compositions. He was uninterested in colour and was much more prolific as a draughtsman than as a painter. His work has a pompous seriousness in tune with his own inflated idea of his genius, but he is a significant figure because of the strictness of his ideals and the influence he had on the next generation of artists, notably Thorvaldsen and the Nazarenes.

He was appointed professor at Berlin, and in 1795 a great exhibition of his works was held in Rome, where he died in 1798. Carstens ranks as the founder of the later school of German historical painting.

Atropos

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Night and Her Children, Sleep and Death

Carsten’s drawing is an allegory on the relation between night, sleep, and death. The darker side of human life was rather suppressed in the Enlightenment, but the Romantics made it their own in both literature and the fine arts.

The sheets of drawings are joined and mounted on board.

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Self-Portrait

Both Denmark and Germany claim this Danish-German painter and draughtsman as their own in their national histories of art, but his greatest impact was on the international group of artists gathered in the last decade of the 18th century in Rome, where Carstens spent his last and most productive years. His severe Neo-classical drawing style and, to an even greater extent, his romantically charged commitment to art influenced such younger artists as Bertel Thorvaldsen and Joseph Anton Koch.

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