CARUS, Karl Gustav

In this painting Carus also shows the figures from behind, so that the viewer experiences the boat trip. At the same time the boat is framed like a vista from the window, creating a picture within a picture.. This was an effect that Friedrich used in many of his interiors where he shows a view out of a window.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Songs without Words op. 30 No. 5 (Venetian gondola song)

Carl Gustav Carus, though fifteen years Friedrich’s junior, was a close friend, associate, and in some ways influence. Like Friedrich, he was a friend of Goethe. He was also author of important literature for the Romantic movement and its ethos. Carus, with Friedrich, was keenly interested in Dutch art of the seventeenth century and took over some of its elements. His Foggy Landscape (also known as Morning Fog) has much of the clear-eyed vision of Dutch Baroque art, but it shares the freshness of contemporary works by Constable and Turner. The watercolour medium of this view was ever more popular in the nineteenth century, especially among men and women like Carus who had other careers in addition to painting and needed speedy pictorial results.

After an initial training in drawing, from 1804 to 1810 Carus studied natural sciences, philosophy, and medicine at Leipzig University. Until 1814, he served as assistant doctor at the maternity clinic of the Triersche Stiftung in his home town, then received a professorship in obstetrics in Dresden. There, in 1817, he met Caspar David Friedrich, who would become a lifelong friend and lastingly influence Carus’s landscape style.

Carus painted this landscape sixteen year after his trip to R�gen.

In this painting Carus adopted the view of a figure seen from behind which Friedrich had introduced; here he is hastening ahead of the viewer into the picture and anticipating his view.

In a Europe becoming remorselessly urban and industrial, the cloaked wanderer trudging away into high mountains with his pilgrim’s staff, though painted in 1820, strikes a suitably symbolic farewell to the Romantic religion of nature.

Carus was a great admirer of Goethe, who in turn highly appreciated both Carus’s theoretical writings and his painting. Carus’s painting of the Goethe monument is described in a contemporary journal as follows. “In a lonely rocky area stands Goethe’s sarcophagus, and upon it a harp; moonlight falls through its strings, illuminating two angels who kneel reverently before it. Mists swirl around the base of the monument. It would seem that Goethe’s manifold and magical contacts with Nature have inspired the ingenious artist to this Ossianic idea.”

Goethe, who devoted himself so intensively to questions of the world and humanity, has been recast in Carus’s picture into an unworldly and lonely Romantic figure. His imaginary grave evokes Romantic yearning in terms of an actual destination, an envisioned place of pilgrimage, an altar, a holy of holies.

Carus was close to Caspar David Friedrich and painted the same Romantic subjects: ruins, mountains, and moonlit nights. But for Carus such themes were an opportunity to admire the beauty of the world more than an occasion for profound contemplation; his paintings tend to delight the eye rather than induce thoughtfulness.

The present painting was inspired by the artist’s impressions gained on a journey around Italy in 1828.