There’s something rather appealing to me, in that way that I should really get out more, about a painting of a place that doesn’t exist. Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) painted “Stadt in Abenddämmerung”, of City in Twilight, in around 1845, and the curious thing is that he didn’t bother painting an actual city at all. This is an invention, a vision of a medieval town silhouetted against a dusky sky, with the slight twist that this painting has now ended up in Lübeck, which has a cathedral and a church with twin towers.
Carus had studied Gothic architecture in England in 1844, and what he created here was an imaginary artwork, a greatest hits of medieval German architecture assembled from memory and imagination rather than from life. It’s all a bit sub-optimal that it’s not real and I think that I’d be annoyed to have a painting of something that didn’t exist. Carus was an interesting character though, he painted Romantic scenes and he ran a maternity hospital, which feels like a rather ambitious use of his lifetime. He’s become quite controversial due to some of his writings about race, which I accept is something rather more important than drawing a fake church…..