CARL GUSTAV CARUS
Leipzig 1789 - Dresden 1869
Something of a polymath, Carus was a great friend of the Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich, and an artist himself who also wrote a published treatise on Romantic landscape painting, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting (1815-1824.) Carus played an important role in the revolution in landscape painting led by Friedrich in Saxony. Born in Leipzig, in 1789, Carus, as well as an accomplished artist, achieved considerable success as a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist and a psychologist. As an artist, he was concerned almost exclusively with landscape painting. While still at school in Leipzig, he took drawing lessons from Julius Diez and subsequently studied under Johann Veit Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1764–1841) at the Oeser drawing academy. In 1811 after six years at university he graduated as a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy. From 1813 Carus taught himself oil painting, copying the Dresden landscape painter Johann Christian Klengel, whose studio Carus visited. In 1814 he was appointed professor of obstetrics and director of the maternity clinic at the teaching institution for medicine and surgery in Dresden. He was later court physician to the king of Saxony.
