“Fifteen years ago, when I visited the landscape painter Friedrich in his studio in Dresden, and he did me the honor of showing me around, he asked: ‘Do my works also strike you as quite repetitive? They say I paint nothing but moonlight, sunsets, sunrises, the sea, seacoasts, snowy landscapes, graveyards, deserted heaths, forest streams, mountain valleys, and such like. What do you think?’ – ‘I believe,’ I replied, ‘that if one thinks and paints as you do, then one actually depicts an immeasurable number of things by means of such motifs.’ – ‘People also say things,’ Friedrich went on, ‘About you. They say you rhapsodize about nothing but religion, chivalry, and courtly love. Well, wouldn’t you care to rhapsodize about something else?’ – ‘No!’ – ‘Well, then!’ he said affably, and I […] dispensed my judgment of Carlyle’s judgment just as affably: ‘Well, there we have it.’” – Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué, Göthe und einer seiner Bewunderer. Ein Stück Lebensgeschichte, Berlin 1840, p. 47.