Carl Gustav Carus

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) is considered a "universal scholar" in the same sense as Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as being a representative of Dresden Romanticism in the circle of Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl. For 55 years, Carus lived and worked as a doctor and a scientist, a philosopher and an artist in Dresden. The catalogue of the exhibition in Dresden and Berlin is based on the extensive holdings of Carus’s works in the Dresden State Art Collections. Including 22 paintings and more than 700 drawings and prints, it sheds light on the remarkable diversity of Carus’s life's work. His artistic oeuvre is presented from the beginning to later landscape motifs based on travel impressions, and nature studies as well as poetic-romantic pictorial compositions. His biographical writings and texts on art theory, medicine, and the natural sciences – which are being examined in their entirety for the first time – are also featured. Exhibits from Carus’s anthropological collection are shown, and light is shed on his relationships with contemporaries such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Caspar David Friedrich and Alexander von Humboldt.

• Universal thinker of Romanticism
• Contemporary and friend of Caspar David Friedrich and Goethe

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