Forests, rocks and torrents - northern landscapes

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Forests, Rocks, Torrents – Norwegian and Swiss Landscape Paintings from the Lunde Collection

Eleanor Robbins reports from the National Gallery, London

This exhibition, prosaically called ‘Forests, Rocks, Torrents’, shows a selection of  Norwegian and Swiss landscape paintings collected by AsbjØrn Lunde, a lawyer who lives in New York. Some of the paintings shown (principally those by Alexander Calame, a Swiss) were exhibited in 2006 in an even more prosaically named exhibition ‘Alpine Views’ at the Sterling and Francis Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  The present show at London’s National Gallery includes works by Calame and a number of contemporary Norwegian painters.

We are told in the catalogue’s introduction that Mr Lunde takes a close interest in problems of connoisseurship, so much so that he himself has become a leading expert in landscape painters of 19th century Scandinavia and Switzerland. He is also a wise benefactor of numerous museums in the USA and Europe, including the Clark Institute, the Kunstmuseum in TromsØ, Norway and the National Gallery in London.  Over the last 16 years he has accumulated a major group of works by Alexandre Calame (1810–64), whose work is becoming better known now because of recent publications and exhibitions.

This is a small show: the pictures fill two galleries comfortably.  In this it carries on a National Gallery tradition, most favoured by a former director, of using one or two works belonging to the Gallery with others on loan to enlarge the subject and present a context within European 19th-century painting as a whole. The catalogue is equally engaging, with just two essays written by Gallery staff focusing on the artists’ discovery of the Alps and the distinctive landscape of Norway. There is a handy ‘thumbnail’ biographical listing of all the painters included in the exhibition together with bibliographical notes to interest the viewer who wants to know more.  

All the works are of the 19th century and they are, so to speak, Romantic depictions of landscape. The artists paint the landscapes they know intimately on site or ‘en plein air’, although there are a few works which suffer an obvious woodenness because of their completion in the studio.  The works are nearly all identified by a specific place: a well-known mountain peak, a rushing river, a fjord or valley. They served as the postcards of the day – typically a view up a valley, with a raging river, rocks and torn trees and a sun-bathed mountain peak in the distance.

Unlike works the German painter Friedrich, who treated the landscape as an overt spiritual metaphor or a symbol of something deeper and more compelling than just the naturalistic view, Alexandre Calame, the leading Swiss painter here, adhered to academic principles of finish and composition while expressing a less dramatic belief in the divinity of nature. He considered all his work to be a homage to God and thought of his paintings as illustrations of the Creator’s work. His works are very ordered, precise and beautifully composed. They are skilfully painted with fine brushwork, tonal unity and close attention to scientific accuracy. Calame travelled to Paris at least twice where he must have encountered the works of contemporary Barbizon artists, but he found them rough and incomplete when viewed closely. Nonetheless, one can see in his less distant views, such as a beech grove and a stony riverbed where great slabs of rock are bleached by the hard, clear light, that he can work with more painterly brushwork. But we never, ever, see the moodiness of light or atmospheric effects characteristic of the more adventurous French painters of the day.

In a useful essay the curator Christopher Riopelle gives depth and context for the exhibition by contrasting the work of the Swiss and Norwegian artists shown. In general terms the painted landscapes resemble each other with their ‘snow-capped peaks, vertiginous, thinly populated valleys…dense forests and raging, ice-cold cataracts’. Distinctive expressions and individual artistic personalities as well as a kind of national consciousness emerge only very slowly with attentive viewing and by using the catalogue as a guide.

The key Norwegian painters here are Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857) and his pupil Thomas Fearnley (1802–42), who travelled to Rome and farther south. They painted much sought-after ‘postcard views’ of famous grottos and ruins using a much warmer, brighter palette than was ever called for in Norway. One feels that Dahl was uncomfortable when being away from his native land and once, while in Rome, he explained why. He felt he could not live in Norway because, he said,’ …there are too few art lovers and works of art. If one is to progress in the arts, these are just as necessary as beautiful scenery’. The two artists travelled to Dresden, then to Switzerland and back and forth to Norway ensuring a growing appreciation for the distinctive landscape of fjords and rocky coastlines. Their works are as true to reality as possible, but tend to be drier and less majestic than the Swiss paintings. 

We are fortunate in having such an excellent catalogue to guide and help us in understanding these two painting traditions so rarely seen in European collections.  Mr Lunde has done a very good deed in sharing his interest and furthering our understanding of these neglected artists.

 Forests, Rocks, Torrents – Norwegian and Swiss Landscape Paintings from the Lunde Collection   by Christopher Riopelle with Sarah Herring is published by the National Gallery, London 2011. 96pp. 100 colour illus, £9.99. ISBN  978 1 85709 523 4