Lot 2231 Dα

The small painting shows a gentle hilly landscape near Dresden, painted by Carl Gustav Carus, the close companion of Casper David Friedrich and created entirely in his spirit. Carl Gustav Carus possessed an astonishing all-round talent. He was a physician, natural scientist and philosopher and in addition became personal physician to the Saxon king, and as self-taught painter became a main representative of German Romanticism.
Our painting “View over evening fields to a farmstead” already exhibits the seed of his understanding of nature. Carus painted it in 1819, one year after meeting the 15-year elder Caspar David Friedrich in Dresden. This encounter was of central importance for his concept of art and, closely following Friedrich, he would become the second great artist of the Dresden Romantics.
With its free painterly execution and tonal colouring, our painting “View over evening fields on a farmstead” can already be described as a distillation of the romantic conception of art. For nature and landscape, far from being realistically portrayed, became carriers of atmosphere, images of feelings and spiritual impulses which are intended to appeal first to the mind of the observer and only then to his spirit and intellect. For the main task of landscape painting - as Carl Gustav Carus himself formulated - is the “depiction of a certain mood of the life of the mind through the reproduction of a corresponding mood of the natural life” (quoted after Carl Gustav Carus: Briefe über die Landschaftsmalerei, Leipzig 1835, p. 43).