After a year at the Chase School, Schmitt enrolled at the National Academy of Design studying with Emil Carlsen.
[4] Upon returning from a year of study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence (cut short by the First World War), Schmitt returned to Warren, where he received a number of commissions from prominent local citizens including Joseph G. Butler, Jr. and Henry K.
Hart Crane, then an unknown poet and newly arrived in New York, was a frequent visitor to Schmitt's studio apartment in the early part of 1917.
Catholic Worker contributing writer Donald Powell recalls the first time he met Schmitt: "Several of us had gathered to discuss social justice.
[20] Shortly thereafter, an attack of tuberculosis forced him to cease work and seek treatment at a sanatorium in Tagliacozzo, Italy.
His wife and family of ten children joined him there in 1938 but they all returned to the United States upon the outbreak of World War II the following year.
"[18] After the war Schmitt preferred to work in relative isolation in Silvermine for the next 50 years, exhibiting locally or by invitation.
"[23] He continued to paint well into his nineties and celebrated his one hundredth birthday at his home in Silvermine surrounded by family and friends.
[27]From a 1978 newspaper interview in conjunction with a retrospective exhibit of the work of Silvermine artists: I'm a visionary, an experimenter.
[28]From a review of an exhibition of religious art at a gallery in New York in 1922: Mr. Schmitt's work brings to mind momentary flashes of such great painters as Botticelli, El Greco, and Rembrandt, or the quiet reaches of Puvis de Chavannes.
[30]From a review of the Exhibit of Well-Known Artists, Pittsburgh, 1923: Carl Schmitt has the uncanny power of imparting life to his work.
He is at a decided disadvantage at a large exhibition where the observer cannot isolate Schmitt's canvases from the surrounding inanities.
He never troubles about the conventional associations of his subjects but uses them to indulge his ardent love for richly colored compositions of involve forms in which the human figure does not distract the eye but it is a unit of a co-ordinated whole.
His originality of invention combined with his disciplined technic promises a future in which he will be regarded as the logical heir of the great Americans such as Homer and Eakins, even though the language he speaks be quite different from the idiom in which they expressed their pictorial ideas ...Carl Schmitt seems to be one of the few modern painters ... that promises to survive the flood of the competently commonplace and the falsely modish.
He is the logical modern heir of the few great American painters and it adds considerably to the honor of the international to have constantly recognized his talent.
The method that gives to the old masters their brilliant translucent depth, that gem-like color value that no straight painting, for all its virtuosity, seems able to attain ...
Carl Schmitt seems to be able to bring the same sense of indoor peace and contentment that the old Dutch masters gave their interiors.
[37] Schmitt's work can be found the collections of the Butler Institute of American Art,[5] the National Portrait Gallery,[11] the Shelburne Museum,[38] the Florence Griswold Museum,[39] the Carl Schmitt Foundation in Silvermine (Wilton), Connecticut, as well as in many private collections across the United States.