Carl Morgenstern was a German landscape painter .

Morgenstern was the son of the architecture and landscape painter Johann Friedrich Morgenstern, who had lived in Frankfurt since the early 19th century. He represented the fourth generation of the artist family originally from Rudolstadt in Thuringia. Like his ancestors, Carl also had fatherly painting and drawing lessons in his youth. From 1826 his works are entered in the family's work book, which his grandfather started in 1800. A distant relative was the writer Christian Morgenstern.

At the age of 21 he went to Munich in 1832 and became a student of the landscape painter Carl Rottmann. In 1834 he spent three years in Italy, from which he returned to Frankfurt am Main in 1837, where he founded his own household in 1845.

In 1866 Carl Morgenstern was appointed professor. At the age of over 81 he died January 10, 1893 in the city of his birth. His grave is in the Frankfurt main cemetery in Gewann F 864. The grave is an honorary grave .

The landscape and marine painter Friedrich Ernst Morgenstern (1853-1919) was his son.