Asmus Jakob Carstens: From Apprentice Cooper in Eckernförde to Artistic Genius Admired by Goethe

On 19 August at 12:30, after the market, we will talk about Asmus Jakob Carstens, a miller’s son born in Schleswig in 1754, who had already shown an inclination for art at school. When he took up an apprenticeship in the de Bruyn wine shop in Eckernförde in 1770 through the mediation of his guardian, his desire to become an artist received important impetus. The wife of de Bruyn, a granddaughter of Christian Otte, encouraged his leisure activities with art. In Kiel he encountered Daniel Webb’s book “Untersuchung des Schönen in der Malerei” (Study of the Beautiful in Painting), which aroused his enthusiasm for the art of antiquity.

In 1776 he started at the drawing class of the Copenhagen Academy with the aim of emerging as the winner in the competition for the Rome scholarship prize. When he refused to accept the silver medal in 1780, he was expelled from the Academy. From 1783 to 1788 he made his way as a portraitist in Lübeck, until he managed to gain a foothold in Berlin.

He soon made a name for himself as an artist and was offered a teaching post at the Berlin Academy by the Minister of Culture von Heinitz. Stubborn as he was, he accepted the position only on the condition that he would not be subordinated to the academic senate.

He had to wait until 1792 to receive a two-year Rome scholarship, which was then extended by one year. In Rome he had arrived at the goal of his aspiration to devote himself to the study of antiquities in the circle of the most important artists of his time.

Carstens resisted the demand of Baron von Heinitz to give an account of his activities in Rome. When the Minister of State ordered his dismissal, Carstens replied on 20 February 1796, “(….) I must tell Your Excellency that I do not belong to the Berlin Academy, but to humanity, which has a right to demand the highest possible training of my abilities from me; and it has never occurred to me, nor have I promised it, to make myself a serf of an academy for life in exchange for a pension which was given to me for a few years to train my talent”.

Carstens died in Rome in 1798. His friend Carl Fernow took the estate with him to Weimar, where Goethe acquired it for the Weimar museum collection. “Carstens was the most thinking, the most striving of all those who were devoted to art in his time in Rome.” (Goethe 1821)