Nine Letters on Landscape Painting

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) - court physician to the King of Saxony - was a naturalist, amateur painter and theoretician of landscape painting whose "Nine Letters on Landscape Painting" is an important document of early German Romanticism and an appeal for the integration of art and science. Carus was inspired by and had contacts with the greatest German intellectuals of his day. He prefaced his work with a letter from his correspondence with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was his primary mentor in both science and art. His writings also reflect, however, the influence of the German natural philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, especially Schelling's notion of a world soul, and the writings of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Carus played a role in the revolution in landscape painting taking place in Saxony around Caspar David Friedrich.