In the first article of this pair looking at paintings of windmills, I covered traditional views up to the first of the pre-Impressionists. This article takes this account from around 1850 up to the period between the two World Wars. Although the development of steam power during the nineteenth century brought great changes to many industries, windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the century, and even then they only declined gradually until the Second World War.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they are being driven by the rising wind.

Windmill styles differ outside northern Europe. When Jean-Léon Gérôme travelled down the River Danube in about 1855, he claimed to have witnessed this moving scene of Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia (1855). A group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior. Gérôme has captured an atmosphere which few of his other paintings achieved: the marvellous light of the sky, the skein of geese on the wing, and the parade of windmills in the distance, all draw together with the soldiers in their sombre greatcoats.

The following year, JC Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual fire-painting following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

During the winter of 1864, Johan Jongkind returned to the Netherlands, where he painted this Winter View with Skaters, which is more overtly pre-Impressionist.

Jongkind’s watercolour sketch of a Windmill at Antwerp of 1866 is even more painterly.

Claude Monet’s second visit to the Netherlands in 1874 ensured that The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam (1874) became a part of the history of Impressionism. This shows a windmill known as Het Land van Beloften, De Eendracht or De Binnen Tuchthuismolen, which was built in the late seventeenth century, and was moved from there to Utrecht just a couple of years after Monet painted it on the banks of the River Amstel.

Frits Thaulow’s painstakingly detailed View of Amerikavej in Copenhagen (1881) shows a windmill in the background, where it’s being used to provide power to the adjacent industrial site.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Ukrainian Landscape from 1882 shows one of the distinctive windmills on the elevated bank alongside a major river and its more populated floodplain to the right.

It may not have been Monet who first made the visual association between Dutch windmills and fields of tulips in flower, but his 1886 painting of Tulip Field in Holland must be its best-known depiction.

When Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, he stayed with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He painted a series of marvellous views of the remaining windmills there, including the most famous of them all, Le Moulin de la Galette (1887), in whose gardens Renoir had painted his Bal du moulin de la Galette a decade earlier.

Paul Signac’s Rotterdam. The Windmill. The Canal. Morning (1906) is a Divisionist view of a windmill in the centre of this major port.

It was a Dutch painter who took windmills from Impressionism to the modernist styles of the twentieth century: Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian’s gentle nocturne of Oostzijdse Mill on the River Gein by Moonlight from about 1903 is one of several views of windmills that he painted in Impressionist and post-Impressionist style.

When he started experimenting with vibrant colour and patterned brushstrokes in about 1908, this painting of a Mill in Sunlight marks his point of departure.

The Red Mill (1911) continues Mondrian’s move towards areas of flat colour. That year he left the windmills of Amsterdam and moved to Paris. To mark his move into the avant garde of that city, he dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname, going from Mondriaan to Mondrian. He became increasingly influenced by Georges Bracque and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, and the purely abstract paintings for which he remains well-known today.

Serhii Svitoslavskyi’s Ukrainian Landscape with Windmills, probably from about 1911, shows a small cluster of windmills with grazing livestock.

By the end of the First World War, milling grain had become more centralised, and the hundreds of thousands of small windmills across northern Europe lost their business. A few have been preserved, and some are still used for specialist products such as stoneground flour. But the unmistakable sight of a windmill on the skyline had been lost from much of the land.

During the 1930s, the Raviliouses started spending time in Sussex, where they became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house The Furlongs at Beddingham, East Sussex, became a second home. Eric Ravilious became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934). This isn’t a windmill in the traditional sense, but a smaller wind-driven pump to extract water from the chalk, mainly for irrigation.

There seems to be some confusion over what windmills are, so this weekend I show a selection of paintings of them across Europe. This article covers the period between 1500-1850, when they remained popular. From the twelfth century until the twentieth, they were a common sight on many skylines in northern Europe. Preceding the better-known vertical windmills were various horizontal designs, and windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the nineteenth century. Used wherever there was a need for driving a rotating axle, they were widely employed to grind cereals into flour, power sawmills, make paper, grind materials, and thresh corn.

Hieronymus Bosch’s uniquely imaginative paintings often featured realistic background landscapes. One recurring setting is a city based on Antwerp or his home town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, with a windmill closest to the viewer. This appears in the centre panel of his triptych The Adoration of the Magi from about 1490-1500, for instance.

A similar windmill appears in a slightly different setting in the version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony now in Lisbon, from around 1500-10, in its right wing. This is shown in the detail below.

The Bruegels also worked amid many windmills, but none seems so prominently out of place than in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Procession to Calvary from 1564. Windmills were commonly built on hills, where they would benefit from the most consistent wind, but this example on a towering crag is not only geographically inappropriate, but completely impractical. It stands on a circular platform to allow the mill to rotate according to the direction of the wind, but would hardly have been above Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion.

More at home are the half dozen windmills clustered around the port of Dordrecht in the Netherlands, shown in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is this dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering grain by barge, and shipping the resulting flour. This should have kept the mill as busy as the wind allowed, and its owner prosperous.

This view of a Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem was painted by John Constable in 1830, almost two centuries after the original made by Jacob van Ruisdael.

Windmills were also a common sight along the lower reaches of the River Thames. William Hogarth’s print from his Industry and Idleness series shows its anti-hero Idle being rowed out to join his ship at Cuckold’s Point on the River Thames, opposite what were then the West Indian docks, between Limehouse and Greenwich. Long after these windmills had gone, this section of the river was still involved with the grain trade.

There were other windmills upstream of the city of London too. In what must be Thomas Girtin’s most famous painting of The White House at Chelsea, from 1800, the artist looks upstream of the River Thames from a location close to the modern Chelsea Bridge. The landmarks shown include, from the left, Joseph Freeman’s windmill (or Red House Mill), a horizontal air mill, the white house close to where Battersea Park is now, Battersea Bridge, and Chelsea Old Church. Girtin painted this when he was twenty-five, and showing greater promise than his rival JMW Turner. Two years later Girtin died of asthma.

A few years later the topographic painter John Varley painted this close-up view of the same Red House Mill, Battersea, Surrey, looking back in the opposite direction.

Some of the well-known windmills supplying the city of Paris with its flour were those above its outskirts on Montmartre Hill. Georges Michel’s view of The Mill of Montmartre was probably painted in about 1820, by which time there were only a few left.

Richard Parkes Bonington probably painted Barges on a River in around 1825-6 when he was travelling near the French town of Nantes. The windmill seen behind the trees is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.

During his detailed realist period early in his career, Johan Jongkind painted this View of Maassluis in Winter (1848). Following the long tradition of landscape painting in the Netherlands, he sets his horizon low and paints a wonderful winter sky.

Once the ripe grain had been cut, the crop had to be gathered into sheaves, then those were assembled into stooks for transport by cart to await threshing, mechanical separation of the precious grain from straw. The latter was an important building material, and was used as thatch for the roof of most country buildings across Europe.

Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through a field of ripe wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters bearing their heavy-duty scythes, at the end of the day. They are awaiting payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.

Adrian Stokes had further to travel for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings that he and his wife made of their protracted visits to Eastern Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut cereal wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind enhancing their strangeness.

John Linnell’s Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load (1853) shows the final wagonload of cut grain leaving the fields at dusk, as the harvest is completed.

Félix Vallotton’s The Sheaves from 1915 is one of his moving and symbolic images of the Great War. It’s late summer in 1914, harvest time, and the ripe corn is being cut and stacked in sheaves. But where are all those farmworkers, whose rakes rest against the sheaves, and whose lunch-basket sits on the ground ready to be eaten? Where is the wagon collecting the harvest, and why is the white gate in the distance closed?

In PS Krøyer’s Threshing in the Abruzzi from 1890, teams of oxen are trampling the crop to thresh it.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grain Threshers, Egypt (1859) also shows this as one of the more traditional employments for animals, here drawing a threshing sledge.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animals were being used as a source of power, as shown in Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines before they were made mobile under their own power, as traction engines.

This is the time of year when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the grain harvest is in full swing, when the fields of cereal crops have ripened gold in the summer sun and are ready to be cut. This weekend I celebrate the climax of the farming year with some of the finest paintings of harvest in European art. Today I concentrate on cutting using a reaping hook or scythe, and tomorrow I look at the formation of sheaves and stocks, and threshing to separate the grain.

In the centuries before mechanical harvesting, cutting the crop was hard work and labour-intensive. It took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, while using a scythe typically took only 2 sweated worker-days per acre. Scythes appear to have been used almost exclusively by men, while sickles and hooks were used by both men and women.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows the whole village turned out to cut, process and transport the crop. This is a visual encyclopaedia of each of the steps involved in the grain harvest, as shown in the details below.

These men are cutting a crop of wheat close to the base of the stem using scythes, leaving short stubble. This ensures the best yield of straw as well as grain.

Behind these workers eating bread baked from flour ground from cereal grown in the same fields, cut cereal is tied first into sheaves before they are gathered into stooks.

In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting usually went on well into the night. These are mostly women wielding sickles or reaping hooks to cut a small field of wheat. The cut stalks are then formed into stooks and piled onto an oxcart for transport to nearby farm buildings.

Palmer’s mentor John Linnell painted The Harvest Cradle twenty-five years later, in 1859. The harvesters have their backs to the viewer, but appear to be using scythes to cut this wheat crop. Bundles of cut grain are tied as sheaves, then assembled into stooks in the foreground.

He painted Wheat for the dealer Thomas Agnew in about 1860, and it became one of Linnell’s more successful works. It was shown at the Royal Academy shortly after completion, then at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.

Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in showing the goddess holding a sickle with a serrated edge, surrounded by sheaves of wheat. On her left she holds a shallow winnow used to separate the lighter chaff from the heavier grain, after threshing.

During the nineteenth century some attached cradles to the blade, to make sheaving easier. This is shown in Laurits Andersen Ring’s painting of Harvest. The crop being cut here may well be rye rather than wheat. The artist got his brother to model for this “monument to the Danish peasant” during the summer of 1885, while working on his farm near Fakse, on Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine from 1880 shows wheat being cut on the steppe, with the worker in the foreground carrying a scythe, but those cutting in the middle distance bent over as if using hooks instead.

The young woman in Mykola Pymonenko’s portrait of a Reaper from 1889 has been cutting what could be rye or wheat using a heavier bagging hook, although she isn’t using the hooked stick normally required for the technique, so could be using it as a regular reaping hook. The woman behind her demonstrates that these harvesters are cutting low to keep a good length of straw on the harvested crop.

In the first of these two articles showing masterly landscape paintings of summer storms, I had reached John Constable in the early 1830s.

Of Constant Troyon’s early paintings the most outstanding must be The Approaching Storm from 1849. Set on a river worthy of Constable, two anglers appear to be readying themselves for the torrential rain heading towards them, while others still wander in the last patch of sunshine on the far bank.

Jules Noel’s Panorama of the Town of Dieppe (c 1865) shows a large picnic party on the cliffs overlooking the town of Dieppe on the coast of northern France. These families seem blissfully unaware of the dark clouds and heavy rain already over the land to the right.

One of the finest and most dramatic of Albert Bierstadt’s paintings from his second expedition to the West in 1863 is this of A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie from 1866. Its foreground shows a pastoral valley floor with a native American camp, in mottled light. Some people and their animals are seen making haste to return from the pastures to the shelter of the camp. A small rocky outcrop has trees straggling over it, which are silhouetted against the brilliant sunlight on the lake behind, in the middle distance.

Behind the lake the land rises sharply, with rock crags also bright in the sunshine. In the background the land is blanketed by indigo and black storm-clouds. Those are piled high, obscuring much of Mount Rosalie, but its ice-clad peaks show proud, high up above the storm, with patches of blue sky above and beyond them. A single large bird, an eagle perhaps, is seen in silhouette, high above the lake.

It was Volodymyr Orlovsky’s painting of Harvest on the steppe in Ukraine, in 1882, that apparently earned the artist’s promotion to Professor in the Imperial Academy.

Few artists ever get to witness tropical storms, but after his time painting winter storms at Cullercoats in England, Winslow Homer witnessed and painted this Hurricane, Bahamas in 1898.

In 1903, Gustav Klimt spent his summer holiday at Attersee with his partner’s family, where he painted this landscape of an Approaching Thunderstorm. Many of his other landscape paintings made during his summers away show no sky at all, but this is an exception.

Thunderstorm at Vernouillet is an atmospheric landscape painted by Pierre Bonnard in 1908, or the following year. Vernouillet is on the southern bank of the river Seine, midway between the centre of Paris and Monet’s property at Giverny.

The young Canadian artist and canoeist Tom Thomson excelled in rapid sketching in oils, with several witnessed accounts of him dashing off a painting in little more than fifteen minutes. As a result he was able to capture many transient effects, such as the passing thunderstorm in Thunderhead from 1912-13.

If you’re fortunate, the storm is soon gone, its humid air blows away, and summer returns.

Arkhyp Kuindzhi specialised in painting in spectacular light. After a Thunderstorm from 1879 is one of his oil sketches capturing the brilliant colour and light following heavy summer rain on the steppe.

As we near the grain harvest in the northern hemisphere, so come the summer storms. Just as the farmworkers have ventured out into the fields of dry, ripe wheat, the heavens above become inky black as towering clouds bring torrential rain and rolling thunder. This weekend we’re in for more than our fair share, in the company of many of the great landscape artists.

At the dawn of modern landscape painting, Giorgione’s The Tempest from about 1504-8 centres on an approaching storm. The sky is filled with inky dark clouds, and there’s a bolt of lightning in the distance. The figures here imply an underlying narrative, but today that can only be speculated.

Nicolas Poussin’s setting of a Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) shows the city of Babylon in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view a large branch has broken with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

There’s frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to a lioness attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover.

Still attributed to Poussin’s pupil and brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, this Landscape with Lightning from 1667-69 lacks the subtlety and finesse of the master himself, but shows a bolt of lightning striking ground and setting a fire in the countryside. In the foreground, a couple flee from among trees being shattered by the strong gusts brought by the storm.

The founding fathers of landscape painting in the Northern Renaissance weren’t to be outdone by those of the south: Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is amazingly effective and accurate, considering it was painted more than two centuries before anyone saw high-speed photographic images of lightning.

In Claude-Joseph Vernet’s series The Four Times of Day from 1757, by Midday the clouds of early morning have built into squally showers. While two people are fishing with nets, a couple with an infant and a dog, in the left foreground, are hurrying for shelter before heavy rain starts. Behind them a shepherd has brought their flock under a grove of trees. Seagulls are wheeling and soaring in the strengthening wind.

George Morland’s Before a Thunderstorm (1791) shows well the rising wind and threatening sky just before a summer storm strikes.

When he was only sixteen, in 1821, Samuel Palmer painted this watercolour sketch At Hailsham, Sussex: a Storm Approaching, a faithful representation of Cumulus congestus building in the distance.

Palmer’s watercolour Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, but set in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex, in the south-east of England. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they’re driven by the wind. Beyond that mill are fields of ripening cereal.

John Constable’s half-size and well-developed study for Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows places an angler in the foreground, as a thunderstorm builds over the Wiltshire countryside behind. Sadly, the fisherman didn’t survive into Constable’s finished painting.

This weekend we’re visiting the rolling chalk Downs in the south of England, including the North and South Downs to the south of London, the Chilterns to the north of the city, and the Berkshire Downs to the west. In the early twentieth century a steady succession of landscape artists moved out from London to live and paint in the hills of southern England.

By 1887, Edward Stott had moved to Amberley at the foot of the South Downs near Arundel in West Sussex, where he lived until his death in 1918. Peaceful Rest is one of his few paintings that was exhibited at the Royal Academy, in this case in 1902. This shepherd has stolen a moment as his small flock drinks from a pond. He’s lighting a clay tobacco pipe, with his crook resting on his leg. Most of the painting uses a limited palette, with three splashes of colour standing out: the man’s face lit by the flame, the watchful sheepdog behind him, and something blue protruding from the shepherd’s jacket pocket. Behind is a shallow chalk cliff at the edge of the Downs.

Stott also painted in pastels. His view of a Chalk Pit near Amberley from 1903 gives a better idea of the rolling chalkland around the village during the harvest, with cut stooks of grain ready for threshing.

At some time in the late summer of 1912, Spencer Gore walked part of The Icknield Way, shown here in his Fauvist view from that year. This is an ancient trackway running from Wiltshire to Norfolk, following the chalk downs of the Berkshire Downs and Chiltern Hills, where he had most probably made sketches of this view of sunset.

Edward Reginald Frampton’s undated view of The South Downs near Eastbourne, East Sussex shows the south-east coast of England during haymaking, with sporadic red poppies in the foreground. The land is otherwise peaceful and deserted, and its sky rises to eternity.

Paul Nash’s autumnal view of the Berkshire Downs was probably painted when he was visiting his father in his home at Iver, in the chalk downland of Berkshire, to the north-west of London.

Nash’s Whiteleaf Cross (1931) might appear unreal, but is quite an accurate depiction of a cruciform hill-carving in Whiteleaf Hill near Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire, not far from the artist’s family home. On a down set between small woods, a chalk escarpment has been cut with a trench extending to the symbol of a cross above. It is late autumn, with trees devoid of leaves, or their foliage a deep brown.

During the 1930s, Eric Ravilious started spending time in Sussex, where he and his wife became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house at Beddingham, East Sussex, became their second home. He became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934), where a few barbed-wire fences mark its boundaries.

Around 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War, Ravilious visited the famous White Horse cut in the chalk downs at Uffington in Berkshire, England. The Vale of the White Horse (c 1939) shows the view from an unconventionally low angle, in pouring rain. This hill figure is thought to date from the late Bronze or early Iron Age, around three millennia ago.

Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, made in the period 1939-44, is a lesson in agricultural history. In the distance, on one of the rolling chalk downs in the south of England, are three horse-drawn ploughs tackling some of the steeper ground, while in the foreground are their successors, the light-wheeled modern tractor. Those are being operated here by women, as most of the men were away serving in the armed forces.

For once I end with a couple of my own paintings, admittedly not in the same league as those above. However, they show the downland where I live, and whose escarpments I walk.

This is the Worsley Obelisk on top of the most southerly downs on the Isle of Wight, looking northwards towards the east-west chalk ridge that runs from Culver Down to the Needles, with the city of Southampton in the far distance. The slopes of these hills are scarred by terracettes, once thought to be created by grazing sheep, but now postulated as being a physical effect on soil.

This view looks east across the village we live in, at Saint Martin’s Down, behind which lie Shanklin and Bonchurch, as shown in two of the paintings in the first of these articles. Since painting this ten years ago, much of the rough grazing on this down has been re-wilding and it’s now dotted with small bushes and scrub.

Southern England doesn’t have any mountains or even rugged hills, but rolling Downs. Being uplands you’d have thought they’d be called Ups rather than Downs, but the word has Celtic origins and means a hill fort, as many have been in the distant past. This weekend I invite you to join me on these hills, in the company of some of the artists who have painted them.

Best-known are the North and South Downs, both south of London, while to the north of the capital are the Chilterns, and to the west are the Berkshire Downs. I live in the furthest south of them all, ridges running across the Isle of Wight and dropping into the English Channel.

Under their rich grassland are great whalebacks of chalk, responsible for their roundness and occasional breaks into chalk cliffs. Much of the downland is protected countryside, with scattered woodland and grazing sheep. Although they aren’t high, typically rising to less than 250 metres (800 feet) above sea level, they present short steep ascents for the walker and cyclist, and spectacular views.

It’s only appropriate that my first painting of the North Downs was made by the French artist Théodore Géricault.

In 1820, Géricault accompanied his masterwork The Raft of the Medusa for exhibition in London, and remained in England until the following year. His Epsom Derby painted in 1821 follows the convention of the day in showing galloping racehorses flying through the air without contact with the ground beneath them. The Derby Stakes is a flat race that has been run on Epsom Downs, to the south of London, since 1780. At that time it was run on a Thursday in late May or early June, despite the unseasonal weather seen here.

A few years later the young and aspiring landscape painter Samuel Palmer spent his formative years between 1826-35 living in Shoreham in the Weald of Kent, an area of sandstone hills between the North and South Downs.

From about 1830, Palmer travelled further from the village of Shoreham, and walked up the nearby downs to paint views from the rolling hills looking over the Weald of Kent, such as The Timber Wain (1833-34). Here a team of oxen is being used to draw a heavy wagon bearing a huge tree trunk down to the village in the valley.

His view of The Weald of Kent from about 1833-34 shows another deep valley below and rolling downs beyond.

Palmer’s view of The Golden Valley from about 1833-34 is an open panorama looking over Underriver, near Sevenoaks in Kent, as an oxcart descends into the valley from the ridge.

In the 1850s, Palmer returned to the rolling downs of the Kent countryside, where he painted this delicate view from Wilmot’s Hill, Kent (c 1851), which makes interesting comparison with his paintings from his time at Shoreham. This is in the chalkland of the North Downs.

During the middle of the nineteenth century a few artists visited the Isle of Wight to paint its chalk downs.

Richard Burchett’s View Across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight was painted from the path that still runs to the west of Saint John’s Church (now known as Saint Blasius’), Shanklin, towards Cliff Copse, in the south of the island. The distant chalk cliffs are the end of Culver Down, at the eastern end of the ridge that runs to West High Down and the Needles in the extreme west.

At Ventnor, Isle of Wight (1856) is a superb watercolour painted by Barbara Bodichon on the coast just a few miles to the south-west of Burchett’s viewpoint. It conforms to the Pre-Raphaelite expectations of landscape painting, and captures the spirit and detail of the chalk cliffs along this stretch of the Channel coast. Painted from near Saint Catherine’s Point, in a friend’s studio, looking east into the dawn sky, it was successfully exhibited at the Royal Academy.

The following year John Brett, the leading Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist, started work on The Stonebreaker (1857-58), at a popular beauty spot in the North Downs, near Box Hill (elevation 224 metres, 735 feet), which dominates the distance. The milestone at the left shows the distance to London as 23 miles, and David Cordingly considers this places it along a historic track known as Druid’s Walk, leading from the Pilgrim’s Way over the Leatherhead Downs to Epsom and London.

Brett made extensive sketches and studies of the motif, worked on the final oil painting for at least twenty days en plein air, but then completed it in the studio during the following autumn and winter. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1858, where it aroused considerable critical interest.

During the winter of 1865-66, Brett’s patron stayed on or near the Isle of Wight, where Brett painted two watercolour landscapes of the Island, of which only February in the Isle of Wight (1866) has been traced. This is where the chalk downs reach the English Channel, probably near Bonchurch in the far south of the island. If that’s correct, the sailing ship in the distance is at the southern end of Sandown Bay, opposite Culver Cliff. This area has suffered major landslips, in 1810, 1818, 1995, and most recently in December 2023.

During the 1920s, in the last years of his career, Lovis Corinth’s paintings reached a new peak, both in their quantity and their innovative exploration of colour and texture.

Although Corinth was clearly relishing this intensity, his Large Self-portrait in Front of Walchensee (1924) shows his race against the effects of age.

The Trojan Horse (1924) is Corinth’s last major painting from classical myth, showing the wooden horse made by the Greeks in order to gain access to the city of Troy, so they could sack and destroy it. The lofty towers and impregnable walls of the city are in the background. The select group of Greek soldiers who undertook this commando raid have already been concealed inside the horse, and those around it are probably Trojans, sent out from the city to check it out before it was taken inside.

Although there are suggestions as to an allegorical relationship between this painting and the First World War, Troy had been a hot topic in Berlin since the excavations at Hisarlık in Turkey in the late nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld.

Corinth also painted for fun: this superb depiction of a Königsberger Marzipantorte (Royal Marzipan Cake) (1924) must have been completed at great speed before his family consumed his model.

The Jochberg at Walchensee (1924) shows this 5,141 foot (1,567 metre) mountain dividing the Walchensee from the Kochelsee.

Walchensee, Vegetable Garden (1924) was painted away from his normal vantage point above the lake, to include the colours and textures of this vegetable patch.

Walchensee (1924) is a watercolour sketch reportedly painted on vellum.

Carmencita, Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth in Spanish Dress (1924) probably doesn’t refer directly to the famous Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno, who had died in 1910. Charlotte Corinth, or Berend-Corinth, had continued painting in the early twentieth century, and joined the Berlin Secession in 1912. She also painted actively when at their chalet. In 1933, she emigrated to the USA, where she produced the first catalogue raisonné of her husband’s paintings. She died in 1967, so I am unable to show any of her paintings.

Corinth painted members of his family more often at this time, as he probably suspected he was reaching the end of his artistic career. In Wilhelmine in a Yellow Hat (1924) his shy daughter is starting to show some of her mother’s vivacity.

Thomas in Armour (1925) shows Corinth’s older child, then 21, wearing the suit of armour that had appeared in several of Corinth’s paintings over the years, in a visual record of his son’s transition into adult life.

Corinth painted Ecce Homo at Easter, 1925, as an act of meditation to mark the festival. It shows the moment that Pilate presents Christ to the hostile crowd, just before the Crucifixion. Christ has been scourged, bound, and crowned with thorns, and Pilate’s words are quoted from the Vulgate translation, meaning behold, the man. In keeping with his earlier contemporary interpretations of the scenes of the Passion, Pilate (left) is shown as an older man in a white coat, and the soldier (right) wears a suit of armour.

Corinth completed this in four days. This was bought for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1929, but in 1937 was condemned by the Nazi party as being ‘degenerate art’. Thankfully, it escaped destruction when it was bought by the art museum in Basel in 1939.

The Beautiful Woman Imperia was one of the last paintings that Corinth completed in the late spring of 1925, and his final fleshly work. It’s based on Balzac’s anthology of tales Cent Contes Drolatiques from 1832-37. This shows the courtesan Imperia, naked in front of a priest, in surroundings suggesting contemporary decadent cabarets, or a far older ‘perfumed room’.

Corinth’s Last Self-Portrait, painted just two months before his death in 1925, is unusual in showing him with his reflection in a mirror. He is now balding rapidly, his cheeks sunken, and his eyes are bloodshot and tired. That summer he travelled to the Netherlands to view Old Masters, including Rembrandt and Frans Hals. He developed pneumonia, and died at Zandvoort on 17 July, four days before his sixty-eighth birthday.

He had painted more than a thousand works in oil, and hundreds of watercolours. He also made more than a thousand prints, an area of his work that I haven’t touched on. Ironically, it was the rise of the Nazi party from 1933 that prevented him from achieving the international recognition his work deserved.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

On the second day of this weekend’s visit to the fjords of Norway, we’ve reached the twentieth century, and a pupil of Eilert Adelsteen Normann (1848-1918).

Clearly inspired by Normann’s views of the fjords, Elisabeth Grüttefien’s style is quite distinct, as shown in her undated Fjord Landscape. Her greens are more vibrant, and there are some fluffy red patches in her blue sky.

In her Fjord with Steamer from about 1900, she includes a sailing boat and one of the larger steamships, just as might have appeared in Normann’s paintings.

She also found some different motifs. In Fjord Landscape, also from about 1900, it is spring, and there’s still plenty of snow left from the winter. Groups of birch trees have yet to come into leaf.

Sadly, Elisabeth Grüttefien then vanished, and her paintings stopped.

Nikolai Astrup, the last landscape artist in this series, spent most of his life in the hamlet of Jølster, to the north of Sognefjord, where his father was the parish priest. He trained under two great Norwegian painters, Harriet Backer and Christian Krogh, and under Lovis Corinth in Berlin. Unlike the previous artists, Astrup was no visitor to the fjords, he lived among them.

Kollen, translated as The Barren Mountain, or simply The Fell, (1905-06) shows one of the huge rocky outcrops towering over the coast of fjords and lakes in this part of Norway. Astrup must have painted this during the late winter.

Astrup recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. His father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard, a rite that had taken place many times over the preceding centuries, and was to follow the artist’s own early death in 1928.

Grey Spring Evening (before 1908) is one of Astrup’s finest paintings of Jølster Lake. In its suffuse light, the hill dominating the opposite bank has rich earths and a shallow strip of green fields near the water’s edge. The pale green spring foliage on the trees in the foreground is muted, and a rowing boat out in the middle of the lake seems a tiny speck lost in the midst of nature.

Jølster Lake is fed from meltwater from Jostedalsbreen, and there’s still abundant snow on the mountains in Astrup’s view of A June Night and Old Jølster Farm, with its lush carpet of marsh marigolds.

His prints clearly influenced his painting style. Kari – Motif from Sunde (c 1918) shows an elfin figure of a girl who has been painted as if in an illustration, or perhaps one of Carl Larsson’s popular albums.

The Cold Frame Mound (c 1921-28) reveals the Astrup family vegetable garden by their house at Sandalstrand, including the ‘cold frame’ of the title. Despite their name, cold frames actually protect plants from the cold, and are used to enable earlier starting of vegetable crops. Sinking the cold frame into the ground (and siting it on a high point) protects its contents from ground frosts, while covering it with glazed windows ensures that daylight can raise the air and soil temperatures within it.

For much of his career, Astrup’s prints and paintings had informed and influenced one another; The Befring Mountain Farms (c 1924-28) is an example of his mixing the media in a single work, coupling woodblock printing with oil painting. It shows an extended series of farm buildings not far from Jølster Lake.

Astrup uses the natural environment to generate one of his most magical works. Two people are engaged in milking a goat by the entrance to a building in the left foreground. The farm buildings have turf roofs with luxuriant growth, in one case sporting a small tree. Spindly birches stand next to them, their leaves shimmering in the light of the crescent moon. That moon is reflected in a small pond surrounded by marsh marigolds in full flower. You can hear the silence among the massive rock bluffs towering over the lake, and that in the centre looks like the head of an owl, watching over the stillness of the night.

With summer here at last, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s time to head north away from the heat and spend a weekend exploring the fjords of Norway in the company of some of the nation’s great landscape artists. Today we’ll see the development of painting during the nineteenth century, then tomorrow we’ll conclude with the early twentieth century.

We start with the founding father of the golden age of painting in Norway, Johan Christian Claussen Dahl, who was born in Bergen, Norway.

In February 1827, Dahl painted one of the finest winter landscapes of a Norwegian fjord, Winter at Sognefjord. This is the largest and deepest of all the Norwegian fjords, shown deserted apart from a few crows gathered around the base of what appears to be a pinnacle of ice. This might be the famous Balder or Frithjof memorial stone at Leikanger.

Hans Gude was in the next generation, and in the earlier part of his career collaborated with fellow-countryman Adolph Tidemand.

Among the results of this collaboration are some of their most spectacular works, such as Bridal Journey in Hardanger (1848). Gude’s highly detailed and realistic landscape is set in the far south-west of Norway, in the region to the east of Bergen, where one of the world’s largest and most spectacular fjords carves its way from glacier to the sea.

Sandvik Fjord (1879) is Gude’s startlingly detailed depiction of a view from above Sandviken, now the northern suburbs of the Norwegian city of Bergen, looking to the west and the island of Askøy.

The most prolific of those who painted the fjords was Eilert Adelsteen Normann, who like many Norwegian artists of the century trained in Germany, in Düsseldorf. He was responsible for attracting many visitors to Norway, who bought his paintings, and in the early 1890s for helping Edvard Munch to success.

Normann’s From Romsdal Fjord, painted in 1875, is the earliest of his dated works that I have located. It shows the ninth longest fjord in Norway, carving its way through this huge mountain gorge. A small party of well-dressed people have arrived in small boats, for a picnic on a rock spit. A sailing boat is gliding slowly along the mirror surface of the water, and in the far distance is a steamer.

A couple of summers later, Normann returned to the same fjord and painted Romsdal Fjord (1877), using a similar formula for its staffage. Next to his signature, at the lower left, the artist states that this work was painted not in Norway but when he was back in Düsseldorf.

Munken gård in Esefjord was painted on the shore of this tributary to the mighty Sognefjord, in the south-west of Norway, near Normann’s summer cabin.

One of the regular passenger and cargo ferry services steams up an unidentified fjord in Normann’s The Steamship.

Sognefjord, Norway returns to Norway’s longest and deepest fjord, as it carves its way due east from the southern bulge of the coastline. This view features Normann’s favourite small craft, and the sky and rock have become very painterly.

Sognefjord is fed by meltwater from Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in continental Europe, and the Hurrungane mountain range, rising to its highest peak Store Skagastølstind, with an elevation of 2,405 metres (7,890 feet). Like several Norwegian mountains, that was first climbed by the English mountaineer William Cecil Slingsby, on 21 July 1876. Slingsby made many first ascents in Norway during his thirty-year climbing campaign there from 1872, and is often regarded as the father of Norwegian mountaineering.

In the autumn of 1919, Lovis Corinth and his family had moved into their chalet at Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. From then until Corinth’s death, they divided their time between the bustle of Berlin and their garden of Eden by the lake and the mountains.

Corinth combined his new enthusiasm for painting floral arrangements with a gentle portrait of his eleven year-old daughter in Flowers and Daughter Wilhelmine (1920). The flowers shown are dominated by amaryllis, arums, and lilacs, and its composition reflects Wilhelmine’s shyness.

During the final six years of his life, Corinth must have painted more than sixty views around their chalet in Bavaria, of which I can only show a small selection. Like many others, Landscape at the Walchensee with Larch (1920) was painted from an observation point on a hill across from their chalet. This painting was bizarrely classified as being ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis in 1937.

The local terrain produces some deceptive appearances, but many of Corinth’s late landscapes have marked tilting in their horizontals, and Walchensee by Moonlight (1920) even shows the same leftward lean in its verticals. This had been prominent in the earliest of his paintings in 1912, following his stroke. Here it probably reflects his shift of emphasis from form to areas of colour, particularly the impasto reflections of the moon on the lake’s still surface.

In 1921, Corinth was awarded an honorary doctorate and made a professor of arts by the University of Königsberg, where he had started his training.

Walchensee, Landscape with Cow (c 1921) is another view painted from his ‘pulpit’ vantage point across from the chalet.

Throughout his career, Corinth had made loose watercolour sketches, usually as preparatory studies for finished oil paintings. Now he started painting watercolour landscapes, such as his Walchensee, Evening Air (1921), capturing the colours of dusk.

Pink Clouds, Walchensee (1921) is another watercolour showing the rich colours of land and sky as the sun sets.

In 1922, his work led the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with a total of thirty of his paintings on display.

Red Christ (1922) is the last, most striking and original of all his many scenes of the Crucifixion. Although thoroughly modern in its approach and facture, he chose a traditional wood panel as its support, in keeping with older religious works. The red of Christ’s blood, spurting from the wound made by a spear, and oozing from his other cuts, is exaggerated by the red of the clouds and the sun’s rays.

Easter at Walchensee was painted from their chalet in 1922, as the winter snow was melting on the tops of the hills.

Corinth also painted some watercolours indoors. His Flower Vase on a Table (1922) has patches of pure, high-chroma colour for the flowers and the armchair at the right, and few suggestions of form.

During this period of frenetic painting, Corinth appeared at first to flourish in the sunshine and fresh air. His Self-portrait in a Straw Hat from 1923 shows him looking in rude health.

Susanna and the Elders (1923) revisits the Old Testament story from the book of Daniel, which had brought him early success in 1890. The two versions he had painted then followed tradition, and show the naked Susanna being spied on by two elders, who then tried to blackmail her. Here he shows the three figures talking, as the elders put their proposition to Susanna.

Back in his ‘pulpit’ above the lake, Tree at Walchensee (1923) has the most rectilinear form of all his views of Walchensee, set by the horizontal snow-line and the trunk of the tree.

Walchensee in Winter (1923) is another evocative snowscape.

Chrysanthemums II (1923) is my favourite of his late floral works, as the texture of the paint matches the fine petals perfectly.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

When the First World War broke out on 28 July 1914, Lovis Corinth and his family had only just come to terms with his stroke in 1911, then found themselves living in a country at war. He and most of the other artists in Berlin shared an enthusiastic patriotism that initially gave them a buoyant optimism.

This patriotism was expressed openly in paintings like Corinth’s In Defence of Weapons from 1915. The same suit of armour in which he had posed proudly for his self-portrait prior to his stroke now saw service in the cause of his country.

But both Corinth and his wife were growing older and more tired. Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1915) shows a very different woman from the younger mother of a few years earlier. Her brow is now knitted, and her joyous smile gone.

The answer, for Corinth and his family, was to get out of Berlin and enjoy the countryside. In the summer they travelled to Lake Müritz (1915) in Mecklenburg, and Corinth started painting more landscapes again.

He also continued to paint still lifes, such as this wonderful Still Life with Pagoda (1916), with its curious combination of Asian and crustacean objects.

Every year from 1916 to 1918, Corinth returned to his home village Tapiau and the nearby city of Königsberg where he had started his professional career, to see the terrible effects of the war on the people. In 1917, he was honoured by their citizens in recognition of his achievements. A substantial one-man exhibition of his paintings was also held in Mannheim and Hanover that year.

Cain (1917) is probably Corinth’s most significant work from the war years, and continued his series of stories from the Old Testament. He shows Cain finishing off his brother Abel, burying his dying body. Cain looks up to the heavens as he places another large rock on his brother, and threatening black birds fly around.

This stark and powerful painting may also reflect Corinth’s own feelings of his battle following his stroke, and those invoked when the US first entered the war that year, as its remorseless slaughter continued.

Götz von Berlichingen (1917) shows the historical character of Gottfried ‘Götz’ von Berlichingen (1480-1562), a colourful Imperial Knight and mercenary. After he lost his right arm in 1504, he had metal prosthetic hands made for him, that were capable of holding objects as fine as a quill. His swashbuckling autobiography was turned into a play by Goethe in 1773, and a notorious quotation from that led to his name becoming a euphemism for the phrase ‘he can lick my arse/ass’.

Corinth celebrated his sixtieth birthday in 1918, and was made a professor in the Academy of Arts of Berlin. However, with the end of the war and its unprecedented carnage, disaster for Germany, and the revolution, Corinth slid into depression.

Armour Parts in the Studio (1918) is his summary of the situation. The suit of armour is now empty, broken apart, and cast on the floor of his studio.

He still managed some fleshly paintings, such as this Girl in Front of a Mirror (1918).

His self-portraits show clearly the effects of war and age. In Self-Portrait in a White Coat (1918) he’s visibly more gaunt. He is shown painting with his left hand, and has used the open sleeve to stow some brushes for ready use.

Just a year later, his Self-Portrait at the Easel (1919) reveals a still older man, looking directly at the viewer, grappling with the changing times.

Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair (1919), one of Corinth’s few works now in the UK (in the Tate Gallery), is one of several he made of Mary Magdalen, a popular subject for religious paintings. This follows the established tradition of showing her as a composite, based mainly on Mary of Magdala who was cleansed by Christ, witnessed the Crucifixion, and was the first to see him resurrected. Apocryphal traditions held that she was a reformed prostitute, and most depictions of Mary tread a fine line between the fleshly and spiritual.

This is Corinth’s most intense and dramatic depiction of Mary, her age getting the better of her body, and her eyes puffy from weeping. She’s shown with a skull to symbolise mortality, and with pearls in her hair to suggest the contradiction of her infamous past and as a halo for her later devotion to Christ.

Corinth also kept up his floral paintings, here with Roses (1919).

In the summer of 1918, Corinth and his family had first visited Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. They fell in love with the countryside there, and the following year bought some land on which Charlotte arranged for a simple chalet to be built. In the coming years, the Walchensee was to prove Corinth’s salvation, and the motif for at least sixty landscape paintings.

In September of 1919, their new chalet was ready, and the Corinths moved in to watch the onset of autumn. Walchensee, Blue Landscape (1919) appears to have been painted quite early, before the first substantial fall of snow.

October Snow at Walchensee (1919) shows an initial gentle touch of snow as autumn becomes fully established.

Later in the season, when the ground was well-covered with snow, Corinth painted it in Walchensee, Snowscape (1919).

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

You didn’t have to travel far in 1887 before you left the city of Oslo, and reached the countryside around it. Following yesterday’s paintings of the centre, today I show a selection of those from nearby.

To remind you, this map shows the extent of the city of Christiania in 1887.

Peder Balke’s view of Frognerkilen and Bygdøy seen from Skillebekk painted in about 1855 comes as a surprise, as he’s known today for his dramatic coastal views of north Norway, up to North Cape, its most northerly point on the mainland. This less rugged view is from the south-west suburb of Skillebekk looking to the south-west to the island of Bygdøy, with its grand neo-Gothic castellated mansion of Oscarshall, now a museum.

Georg Fredrik Nielsen Strømdal’s panoramic view of Kristiania seen from Egeberg from 1889 is one of the finest of the city at the time. This looks to the west from a hill at Egeberg to the south-east of the city. The mouth of the Loelva River is in the foreground, and behind it the port and industrial buildings of Bispevika and Bjørvika. In the right distance is the Royal Palace, with Oscarshall further to the left.

In the summer of 1886, Eilif Peterssen painted on Fleskum Farm in Bærum, now an affluent suburb to the west of Oslo, with Harriet Backer, Kitty Kielland, and others. One evening he started work on his view of the local lake, Dæhlivannet, which became one of his greatest landscape works, Summer Night (1886).

The following year, he took that same view, added some flowers, and worked in a nude to produce his Nocturne (1887), which was also widely acclaimed. The contrast in finish is marked, with the earlier painting crisp in its detail, while this version is more painterly.

Peter Nicolai Arbo, better known for his paintings of Nordic myth, is unusually painterly in this landscape of a View of Frognerslot from Skovveien (1890). This old manor house is set in a Baroque garden that now forms part of Oslo’s largest park.

Eilif Peterssen returned to Bærum in the summer of 1891, when he painted the Impressionist Sunshine, Kalvøya (1891), compared by the critics to the paintings of Berthe Morisot.

By 1916, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen and his family were spending their summers in a rented house in Asker, a rural area just outside Oslo that was already popular with Norwegian artists including Harriet Backer.

Johannessen’s Rain (1915-16) is an evocative painting of a thoroughly wet day there. Asker is on the bank of Oslo Fjord, and ideal for family coastal sailing, and walking.

His Landøen in Asker (1916) is a view of part of the dissected coastline near Asker, south-west from the city, down Oslofjord.

The Artist’s Summer House in Asker (1916) shows their rented property, with the artist’s wife Anna making her way up its steps.

The last brushstroke has to be Edvard Munch’s.

Munch returned to painting landscapes after the First World War. Starry Night (1922–24) is one of the most distinctive of these, showing the woods and snow-covered hills outside the distant city of Oslo.

Think of Norway and you envisage fjords, but the best-known paintings of the country show its capital Oslo, in Edvard Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan and The Scream. This weekend we’re off to spend a couple of days visiting the streets of the city today, and the surrounding countryside tomorrow.

Oslo became a capital around 1300, and was originally centred on its royal residence and the mediaeval Akershus Fortress built to defend it. Much of the old city was destroyed by fire in 1624, so was rebuilt and renamed Christiania in honour of its King Christian IV. From 1877, when it was growing as a trading port, it was officially respelled as Kristiania, and was only renamed Oslo in 1925.

This map shows the relatively small urban area as it was in 1887. It’s situated at the northern end of Oslofjord, that broadens as it runs south to open into the eastern side of the North Sea opposite the artists’ colony at Skagen in Denmark. Most of its major buildings date from the nineteenth century, when it acquired its Royal Palace, parliament, university and commercial centre. Its population grew rapidly from less than ten thousand at the start of that century to nearly a quarter of a million by its end.

The centre of the city is dominated by its best-known street, Karl Johan, running from the Royal Palace in the west to the central railway station in the east.

Christian Krohg’s Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) from 1889 shows Karl Johan in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. They are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers in which to put the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

Edvard Munch painted numerous views of this street, here Karl Johan in the Rain from 1891. This shows it rising up towards the Royal Palace in the distance, with its pavements crowded with black umbrellas.

Munch’s famous Evening on Karl Johan from the following year was originally just known as Evening. This looks from the Royal Palace towards Storting (the parliament building) with greatly foreshortened perspective to pack the pedestrians together and instil a deep sense of anxiety.

Christian Krohg’s wife Oda painted this wonderful Portrait of Christian Krohg in about 1903. Although made during their years in Paris, it shows the artist by the Grand Café on Karl Johan, as a military band marches along the tramlines.

Munch continued to paint through the 1930s, although little of his work from those years is well known. Summer on Karl Johan Street, Oslo (1933) shows how much his style continued to evolve, and contrasts with his earlier dark, anxious and melancholic scenes. This view is from the west end of Karl Johan, close to the Royal Palace.

When Frits Thaulow returned to Norway at the end of the nineteenth century he painted several views of the Akerselva or Akerselven River running through industrial buildings in the eastern part of the city centre. Those include The Akerselven River in the Snow, probably painted between 1897-1901.

This is Thaulow’s atmospheric pastel of Winter in Akerselva from about 1897.

In 1912, Thorolf Holmboe painted another section of the river in Akerselva by Marselis’ gate. This is a more modern apartment block well to the north of the central station.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was born and brought up in the poor suburb of Hammersborg, to the north of Karl Johan.

During the early years of the twentieth century, Johannessen painted colourful street scenes of the city, such as this Market Scene from about 1916.

Johannessen’s Mother and Child (1918-20) is set in the Hammersborg district, where a care-worn working class mother is seen walking out at night, her young child held firmly within her shawl.

Gudmund Stenersen’s contrasting Sunday in Majorstuen from 1921 shows this more affluent suburb at the western edge of the city, where construction didn’t start until the end of the nineteenth century, when the railway reached it and made commuting easy. This winter’s day is sufficiently snowy for many of these folk to be carrying their cross-country skis, and one woman in the foreground is still skiing on hers.

This is the second of two articles looking at paintings of the Zealand countryside from the early nineteenth century up to the 1930s. I have reached the start of the twentieth century, and proceed with the landscapes of the two Andersens, Laurits Andersen Ring and Hans Andersen Brendekilde.

After LA Ring married Sigrid, daughter of the ceramicist Herman Kähler, the family settled in the village of Baldersbrønde, midway between what’s now the western edge of Copenhagen’s conurbation, and the city of Roskilde, on Zealand. By the Village Pond at Baldersbrønde from 1911 shows this village with its rutted mud track, in early Spring when the pollards are still bare of leaves.

The other painting Andersen of the day was LA Ring’s friend and contemporary originally named Hans Andersen, who adopted the surname of Brendekilde after the village of Brændekilde, on the island of Funen (Fyn), where he was born.

Brendekilde’s A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church from 1914 shows Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on Zealand. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).

LA Ring later moved to the tiny rural island of Enø, linked to Zealand by a bridge at Karrebæksminde.

The Bridge at Karrebæksminde from 1912 must be one of Ring’s most intricately detailed works, showing the bridge connecting the large and populous island of Zealand with tiny Enø. This canal was dug in the early nineteenth century to connect Karrebæk Fjord with the waters of the Baltic, and has a strong tidal stream, as demonstrated here.

By 1911, LA Ring and his family had bought a caravan, which in those days resembled a railway goods wagon and usually weighed several tons. Most had to be towed by a truck or one of the traction engines still used on farms, and were barely mobile. The Artist’s Wife with the Family Caravan (1911) shows his wife Sigrid in a loose-fitting dress, under the shade of a parasol, enjoying a holiday amid sand dunes, somewhere on the Danish Baltic coast.

In the summer of 1913 Ring and his family holidayed again in their caravan. In his View of a Shore with the Artist’s Wagon and Tent at Enö, they are seen on the south-west coast of the island of Enø. They have spilled out into a tent, whose heavy guy ropes are being used to dry washing.

After the start of the First World War, LA Ring retired to a house built for him near the city of Roskilde, in the centre of Zealand. This was ideally situated in what was then the neighbouring village of Sankt Jørgensbjerg. Although generally flat and low country, the land rises to 40 metres (130 feet) above the water of Roskilde Fjord. Ring’s house and environs gave him fine views over the city, country, and the fjord itself to the north, that dominated his paintings during the final eighteen years of his life.

In the winter of 1916 he painted one of his finest landscapes, View of Roskilde from Sankt Jørgensbjerg. It’s a dull grey day, with the snow still lying on the ground. Although distant, the great cathedral dominates from its position at the top of the hill. In seemingly painting every single branch and twig on the barren trees, Ring has brought a fine, rhythmic texture to the foreground that extends right to the skyline. The detail below shows his rich vocabulary of textures in the trees, field, and buildings, which compensate for the muted colours.

Spring Day at Køge from 1931 was painted at this town to the south of Roskilde, on the coast opposite southern Sweden.

One of the last of LA Ring’s landscapes shows this View Over the Roofs at Sankt Jørgensbjerg, Denmark, from 1932. By this time, he was 78, still a superb artist with great precision in his detail of the leafless trees, and in the texture of the thatch. The church behind the trees is that of Sankt Jørgensbjerg, and this view is from the artist’s house.

The island of Zealand (Sjælland) lies between Germany and Scania (Skåne) in southern Sweden, on the south-western edge of the Baltic Sea, and is the most populous of the Danish islands. The capital Copenhagen (København) is on its eastern coast, looking across Øresund, the strait separating it from Malmö in Sweden.

Like most European cities, Copenhagen grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, from a population of just over 100,000 to four times that in 1901. Many of those migrated from the surrounding countryside, where they had farmed the land. This weekend I show paintings of the Zealand countryside from the early nineteenth century up to the 1930s.

Although JC Dahl had been born in Norway, he painted for much of his early career in Copenhagen, and later returned to the Zealand countryside. In 1829, he painted this Winter Landscape at Vordingborg, showing barren trees and snowy fields near the town of Vordingborg, in the south of Zealand. Plenty of sinister crows in the air and on the ground help build the sense of grim foreboding.

In Dahl’s Copenhagen Harbour by Moonlight (1846), he shows many ‘fully-rigged’ sailing ships in this major port at the south-western end of the Baltic Sea.

Painted in 1856, his Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual brandje (a painting of fire) following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although completed well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature. Stege is a small town on an island in the south of the Zealand archipelago.

Laurits Andersen adopted his surname Ring from the village where he was born in the south of Zealand. His Young Girl Looking out of a Roof Window (1885) eloquently expresses the feelings of a migrant from the countryside when trapped in a garret amid the grey urban roofscape of Copenhagen.

His painting of Harvest shows his brother cutting what’s most probably rye rather than wheat, as a “monument to the Danish peasant”. He painted this during the summer of 1885, when his brother was working on his farm near Fakse on Zealand.

Erik Henningsen’s painted record of Farmers in the Capital from 1887 is one of the few contemporary accounts of migrants from the country. This family group consists of an older man, the head of household, two younger women, and a young boy. Everyone else is wearing smart leather shoes or boots, but these four are still wearing filthy wooden clogs, with tattered and patched clothing. The two men are carrying a large chest containing the family’s worldly goods, and beside them is their farm dog. The father is speaking to a mounted policeman, presumably asking him for directions to their lodgings. The large brick building in the background is the second version of Copenhagen’s main railway station, opened in 1864, and replaced by the modern station in 1911.

LA Ring’s Mogenstrup Church (1888-89) shows an elderly couple in their tattered Sunday best clothing, slowly making their way home after attending this church near his home village of Ring. The man’s shoes are still polished and his top hat also shiny, but like many country couples these two were no strangers to hunger or deprivation.

In 1891, Ring visited Herman Kähler’s ceramics factory in Næstved in the south of Zealand, and in the adjacent village painted this rural genre work, Conversation in the Countryside, Lille Næstved. It shows a mother with her two young children talking to an older boy, who sits on a doorstep staring at the viewer. Although the mother and family appear clean and fairly well-dressed, the boy’s clothing is worn out and tattered. Running behind them is the small stream that functioned as the dirt road’s main drain. Most of the cottages are small, and thatched, with the chimney of Kähler’s factory in the background.

The bog at Carlsminde in Søllerød, Zealand from 1906 is one of LA Ring’s finest landscapes, although perhaps more appropriate for pre-Impressionist painting in the middle of the nineteenth century. It shows a lake in the grounds of a Baroque mansion in Søllerød, to the north of Copenhagen. This estate had been bought by Isak Glückstadt in 1903, who expanded it and had it landscaped around this lake, with its stock of pike and tench. Glückstadt seems to have been eccentric, at one time keeping two Indian elephants here.