The Painter Gerhard von Kügelgen in his Studio

The more idealistic and individualistic branch of German Romantic painting took form among a circle of friends in Dresden. Participants included Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847), Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869), and Johann Christian Clausen Dahl (1788 -1857). Friedrich, Kersting, and Dahl were educated at the Academy of Copenhagen, while Carus, who was actually a doctor, philosopher, and naturalist, was an autodidact in the field of art.

In 1811, Kersting not only eternalised Caspar David Friedrich in a studio image that has become famous (Hamburger Kunsthalle), but also depicted the fifth friend in their association in the portrait, "The Painter Gerhard von Kügelgen in his Studio" (1811). The viewer looks into the richly decorated studio - compared with Friedrich's sparse workshop - as onto a proscenium stage. At the right, books are piled on a desk, behind them is a shelf with plaster casts, in the area in front of the window are two easels, one large, one smaller. Kügelgen sits at the smaller easel, and behind him, a lyre and two guns adorn the wall, before which the artist's painting utensils rest in an étagère. Portraits of his children hang on the left-hand wall of the highcelinged room. On the floor beneath them are paintings of Schiller and Goethe. This work demonstrates Kersting's sensitive representation of objects that, at first, seem secondary. In fact, the collected items in the painting indicate qualities and preferences of the portrait's subject. Kersting had shown courage and bravery as a member of the volunteer corps of Lützow in the battle for liberation from the French occupation. In 1816, he had gone to Warsaw to serve for two years as a drawing teacher in royal service. He returned to Dresden permanently in 1818, where he gained a position as principal painter at the Meissen porcelain manufactory.

In the years to follow, he became a specialist in interior paintings that combined portrait and genre styles. With quiet seriousness, rational concentration on the essentials, yet also a refined love for detail, he created atmospheric and expressive paintings of his contemporaries and their physical and intellectual world. The Kunsthalle exhibits Carus' small nocturnal scene of a "Painter's Parlour in the Moonlight".,. It is dedicated to the subject that Rudolf Zeitler identified (in reference to this painting) as characteristic of the epoch, namely, the "enchantment of the distance". This theme was considerably more significant in the œuvre of Caspar David Friedrich, who emphatically expanded it into the realm of the transcendental.