“Streams and streams are freed from ice”: it’s spring for Goethe’s Faust and his Wagner family in the painting by the romantic polymath and artist Carl Gustav Carus. In 1837 he painted the two of them standing on a rocky hill during an Easter walk, as back figures in front of the church towers of a medieval town. The atmospheric red tones of the evening sky contrast effectively with the silhouette-like dark figures in the backlight. As dusk falls, the tragedy begins, in the form of the poodle jumping in from the left, the core of which Mephisto will reveal himself to be.
The picture was hidden from public view for almost 200 years. Now it will be auctioned from a Thuringian private collection on March 2nd at the Schmidt auction house in its place of origin in Dresden, estimated at 100,000 to 140,000 euros. It is probably the darkened oil painting “Dusk. To Goethe's Faust” in the rounded top, completely profiled and gilded original frame around the picture that Carus exhibited in the Royal Saxon Academy of Arts in 1937 and which is listed in the corresponding catalog under number 144. What route it took afterwards is unknown.
The history of the approximately 50 centimeter high painting, on the other hand, is well documented in a letter that Carus – then privy and medical councilor at the Saxon royal court – wrote to Johann Gottlob Regis in 1836. In it he reported to the poet and translator that a Faust had “appeared” to him and that he had already created a picture of it. Carus' “Letters about Göthe's Faust” published in 1835 were also addressed to Regis: dealing with drama was a life theme for the multi-talented man, about which he exchanged ideas with Goethe.
The present painting is the third in a series: Carus painted Faust and Wagner on the “Easter Walk” and “Faust in the Mountains” as early as 1821. Drawings were added later. These works are preserved in German museums. The “Dusk” picture could travel far, an export license is available. Just how popular Carus is again became apparent in Vienna last year, when a “view from a prison window into the sky” at Kinsky shot up from an estimated 10,000 euros to 175,000.
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