As the relationship with his mother fell to a new low he left Weimar and moved to Dresden in May 1814. He continued his philosophical studies, enjoyed the cultural life, socialized with intellectuals and engaged in sexual affairs. His friends in Dresden were Johann Gottlob von Quandt, Friedrich Laun, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl, a young painter who made a romanticized portrait of him in which he improved some of Schopenhauer's unattractive physical features. His criticisms of local artists occasionally caused public quarrels when he ran into them in public. However, his main occupation during his stay in Dresden was his seminal philosophical work, "The World as Will and Representation", which he started writing in 1814 and finished in 1818. He was recommended to Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus by Baron Ferdinand von Biedenfeld, an acquaintance of his mother. Although the publisher accepted his manuscript, Schopenhauer made a poor impression because of his quarrelsome and fussy attitude and very poor sales of the book after it was published in December 1818.