CARL CARUS GUSTAV

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) was a German landscape painter and art critic. He was born in Leipzig, where he studied chemistry and then medicine. He was also a physician, biologist, Professor for Obstetrics and philosopher. He was a pioneer for experimental work in comparative osteology, insect anatomy, and zootomy. In 1811 he graduated as a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy.

Carus painted in his leisure time, but it was his writing on art theory that made him a leading scholar of the period. Carus's philosophy was essentially Aristotelian in that he followed ‘the unfolding or elaboration of an idea in experience from an unorganized multiplicity to an organized unity.’

From 1814 to 1817 he taught himself oil painting working under Caspar David Friedrich, a Dresden landscape painter. Later he studied under Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld at the Oeser drawing academy.

Carus was appointed a physician in attendance, when King of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II, made an informal tour of Britain in 1844. Carus had chance to visit sights in London and the university cities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Carus developed a theory of landscape painting whose objective was the ‘visualization of the inner workings of geological phenomena’, which he called Erdlebenbildkunst = pictorial art of the life of the earth.

Carus was a plein air painter through whole career. In some of his later works, the traces of impressionism seeps in, perhaps due to the fast capture of the evolving scene. Yet he was a meticulous detailing person.

 

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