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Scandinavian Landscape Painting in the 19th Century

by John McGee

Hans Fredrik Gude, The Sandvik Fjord, 1879, 54.5x81.5cm, oil on canvas 
(Photos courtesy Sweden Nationalmuseum, Stockholm and Goteburg Museum of Art)

At times, the Japan Rail-owned Tokyo Station Gallery can seem like an upscale tourist office promoting exotic destinations. Previously, it was the open steppes of Mongolia (Modern Paintings of Mongolia). Now, it's the slanting sunlight and winding waterways of Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

This survey show follows the northward migration of major European movements like Romanticism and Realism in the 19th century and tracks the homegrown discoveries of Nordic painters occurring at the same time. Most significantly, it outlines the growing sensitivity to native landscapes that helped create a sense of national identity.

Due to limited resources in their own countries, many Scandinavian artists of this period traveled to European art centers like Paris and Dusseldorf to train or live. When they returned, they brought new ways of seeing and appreciating the rugged mountains and fjords of Norway, the impenetrable forested islands of Sweden, and the rolling fields of Denmark. The 76 paintings—mostly from the Sweden Nationalmuseum, Stockholm—span the early Danish Golden Age to fin-de-siecle Symbolism.

Carl Stephan Bennet, View of the Royal Palace of Stockholm, Winter,
1830s, 45.5x58.5cm, oil on canvas 

During the Golden Age (the first half of the 1800s), Danish artists developed their own distinctive style that combined firsthand, scientific observation of nature with classical idealization. Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and his successors Christen Kobke and Johan Thomas Lundbye captured their local surroundings in small plein-air paintings that anticipate the arrival of Realism in the 1880s. Kobke's Dosseringen, Looking Towards Osterbro (1836) finds weeds sprouting along a Copenhagen lakefront. Lundbye's loose, vibrant Landscape Study (1841) looks over the hills and plains near the capital's Frederiksborg Castle. 

Meanwhile, Swedish and Norwegian artists began using Romanticism, a German import, to depict the epic landscape features of their countries. In Johan Christian Dahl's Mountain Scenery (1848), peasants work a narrow strip of arable land wedged between rocky hills and a river. Johan Fredrik Eckersberg's Landscape from Romsdalen (1858) treats the same subject with even more drama—higher, toothier mountains, and a wider river.

Nils Kreuger, Seaweed Carters, Halland, 1898, 90x129cm, oil on canvas 

Regardless of style, many paintings in this show revel in the special blue twilight of Scandinavia's short summer nights and long winters. View of the Royal Palace of Stockholm, Winter (1830s) by Carl Stephan Bennet, exemplifies this characteristic color scheme. The flat light of a low-hanging full moon brightens the cold, gunmetal blue of the snow-covered Stockholm waterfront. 

Other "blue paintings" evoke a loneliness both pleasant and melancholy. Narrow bands of water snaking around dark forested Swedish islands reflect frail midnight in Prince Eugen's Summer Night at Tyreso (1895). It's so dark it looks like an underexposed photograph. In Eugene Jansson's 1896 paintings of the Stockholm waterfront, the brushy blue, crepuscular sky blends into dark blue sea. 

Several painters lie outside easy classification. Playwright August Strindberg, for example, whipped up a gray-green stormy seaside triptych with an energetic palette knife. In Jays (1886), Bruno Liljefors depicted birds and plants with the detailed eye of a scientific illustrator. But a few years later, he rendered Wild Ducks Among Equisetum Palustre (1901) with a graphic, Nihonga-like spatial flatness. And strictly for name recognition, a bland Edvard Munch seashore is included.

Despite the banal title, the range of work in this show reveals a complex evolution of landscape depiction and hints at the search for identity that it represented.

The Scandinavian Landscape Painting in the 19th Century exhibition was held Sep-Nov 2002 at Tokyo Station Gallery in Marunouchi, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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