Carl Gustav Carus on Caspar David Friedrich

“He never made sketches, cartoons, or color studies for his paintings, because he stated (and certainly he was not entirely wrong), that such aids chill the imagination somewhat. He did not begin to paint an image until it stood, living, in the presence of his soul..”

“In landscape it was Friedrich above all whose profound and vigorous mind, with total originality, laid hold of this tangle of banality, staleness, and tedium and—cutting through it with a mordant melancholy — raised from its midst a distinctively new and radiant poetic tendency.”

“Friedrich, with his somewhat stiff and diffuse but highly poetic manner, was the first artist — in painting as a whole, but more especially in landscape painting — who ever assailed and shook up the philistines of Dresden. There had been a great stir when one of his paintings, a crucifix on a rock beneath dark fir trees and against the dying glow of an evening sky, had given rise to a literary controversy conducted on Friedrich's behalf by his friend Gerhard von Kügelchen [Kügelgen] and on the opposing side by a prosaic dilettante, a certain Herr von Ramdohr — to the latter's eventual discomfiture.”