Romantic Painting in other European Countries

 

SCANDINAVIA

As the previous review has shown, Romantic painting was doubtless centered in Germany and England, where, in the field of landscape painting especially, theoreticians' advocacy of the liberation of the individual from social constraints and his becoming one with the universe found clearest expression. France, on the other hand, evinced a quite unique development in which genre and history pictures predominated and to which stylistic classifications are very difficult to apply. This difficulty also often confronts us when we look further, to the painting of other European countries.
Scandinavia, however, poses no problem in this regard. The source of Romanticism there was the Copenhagen Academy. Although Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard (1743-1809) was a friend of Fuseli and Alexander Runciman in Rome, and adopted many of their subjective traits and formal distortions to increase the expressiveness of his motifs, he nevertheless ran his academy classes along largely neoclassical lines. The academy's director, Jens Juel (1745—1802), was likewise beholding to this tradition, yet in small landscapes done around 1800  he anticipated the naturalism that would soon come to the fore in Germany, in the work, for instance, of Wilhelm von Kobell (1766-1856). The Copenhagen Academy was able to provide key German Romantics, Friedrich and Runge, with a training the excellence of which they continually emphasized. Also, it was there that their first contacts were made with the indubitable master of Scandinavian Romantic painting, the Norwegian Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, who in 1818 settled in the immediate neighborhood of his friend, Friedrich, in Dresden and frankly admitted that Friedrich was his ideal.
 

Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard

b Copenhagen, 11 Sept 1743; d Frederiksdal, Copenhagen, 4 June 1809). Danish painter, designer and architect. His paintings reveal both Neo-classical and Romantic interests and include history paintings as well as literary and mythological works. The variety of his subject-matter reflects his wide learning, a feature further evidenced by the broad range of his creative output. In addition to painting, he produced decorative work, sculpture and furniture designs, as well as being engaged as an architect. Successfully combining both intellectual and imaginative powers, he came to be fully appreciated only in the 1980s
 

Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard
Filozofia

 

Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard
Nocna Mara
1800

 

Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard
Osjan
1782

 

Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard
Philoctetes
1775

 

Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard
Scenes from "Niels Klim's Subterranean Journey" by Baron Ludvig Holberg


 

Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard
The Spirit of Culmin Appears to his Mother, from the Songs of Ossian

Jens Juel

(b Balslev, Fünen, 12 May 1745; d Copenhagen, 27 Dec 1802). Danish painter. Noted for his landscapes and portraits, he painted compositionally balanced works in a harmonious palette, continuing a classical painterly tradition. The son of a vicar at Gamborg on Funen, Juel went to Hamburg (then under Danish sovereignty), where he studied under the German artist Johann Michael Gehrmann (d 1770). In 1765 he briefly returned to Fünen and then to Copenhagen, where he studied at the Kunstakademi until 1771. While at the academy he came under the influence of Carl Gustaf Pilo, a professor there from 1748 and best known for his portraits of the Danish royal family. It was also at the academy that Juel perfected his considerable talent in drawing.
 

Jens Juel
Portrait of a Woman
1773

 

Jens Juel
Portrait of a Noblewoman with her Son
1799

 

Jens Juel
Portrait of Jean-Armand Tronchin
1779

 

Jens Juel
Portrait of Madame de Pragins
1779

 

Jens Juel
A Strom Brewing behind a Farmhouse in Zealand
1795

 

Jens Juel
A Running Boy
1802