Memory of a Wooded Island in the Baltic Sea by Carl Gustav Carus was created in 1835. The painting is in Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister Dresden. The size of the work is 117,5 x 162,5 cm and is made of oil on canvas.
About the Work
As an artist, Carus was a dilettante in the best sense of the word and a self-taught painter, albeit one with far greater artistic power than many of his colleagues in his main profession. He painted this grandiose, original, large-format landscape scene in the winter of 1834/35 in late memory of the trip to Rügen that he had undertaken in 1819 in Friedrich’s footsteps: ‘Even in these grey days, I sometimes pinch off an hour at lunchtime to work in my painting room […] on mighty oaks, which now attract me like a reawakened childhood love.’
A day trip to the island of Vilm to the south-east of Putbus was particularly vivid in his memory, the unspoilt nature and remoteness from civilisation of which still fascinated Carus afterwards: “I can say that I have hardly ever had the feeling of such pure, beautiful and solitary natural life as I had on this small island, which no one else who visits Rügen tends to see. Read more in Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister Dresden
About the Artist
Carl Gustav Carus (3 January 1789 – 28 July 1869) was a German physiologist and painter, born in Leipzig, who played various roles during the Romantic era. A friend of the writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe, he was a many-sided man: a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist, a psychologist, and a landscape painter who studied under Caspar David Friedrich.
In 1811 he graduated as a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy. 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 wrote on art theory. From 1814 to 1817 he taught himself oil painting working under Caspar David Friedrich, a Dresden landscape painter. Subsequently, he studied under Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld at the Oeser drawing academy. Read more in Wikipedia
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