charm. He is also one of the best Danish landscape painters.
The silvery atmosphere and sad, mysterious stillness of the
island-realm rest on Johansen’s pictures. Not less satisfactory
in their little world are the rest: Holsöe (b. 1866), Lauritz Ring
(b. 1854), Haslund, Syberg (b. 1862), Irminger (b. 1850), and
listed paint the pleasant life of Copenhagen. In Skagen, a
fishing town at the extreme end of Jutland, we find painters
of sea life: Michael Ancher (b. 1849), Anna Ancher (b. 1859),
and C. Locher (b. 1851). The landscape painters Viggo Pederson
(b. 1854), Philipsen (b. 1840), Julius Paulsen (b. 1860), Johan
Rohde (b. 1856) have made their home in the villages round
Copenhagen. Each has his own individuality and sees nature
with his own eyes, and yet in all we find the same sober tone,
the same gentle, tearful melancholy. The new Idealism has,
however, been discernible in Denmark. Joakim Skovgaard
(b. 1856), with his “Christ among the Dead” and “Pool of
Bethesda,” is trying to endow Denmark with a monumental
type of art. Harald Slott-Möller (b. 1864) and J. F. Willumsen
(b. 1863) affect a highly symbolical style. But even more than
these painters, who aim at reproducing ancient folk-tales
through the medium of modern mysticism, two others claim
our attention, by the infusion into the old tradition of a very
modern view of beauty approaching that of Whistler and of
Carrière: one is Ejnar Nielsen, whose portraits have a peculiar,
refined strain of gentle Danish melancholy; the other, V. Hammershöj,
who has an exquisite sense of tone, and paints the
magical effect of light in half-darkened rooms. Among the
more noteworthy portrait painters, Aug. Jerndorff and Otto
Bache should be included; and among the more decorative
artists, L. Frölich; while Hans Tegner may be considered the
greatest illustrator of his day. (R. Mr.)
Sweden
There is as great a difference between Danish and Swedish art as between Copenhagen and Stockholm. Copenhagen is a homely provincial town and life is confined to home circles. In Stockholm we find the whirl of life and all the elegance of a capital. It has been styled the Paris of the North, and its art also wears this cosmopolitan aspect. Düsseldorf, where in the ’sixties most painters studied their art, appeared to latter-day artists too provincial. Munich and, to a still greater extent, Paris became their “Alma Mater,” Salmson (1843–1894) and Hagborg (b. 1852), who were first initiated into naturalism in Paris, adopted this city for a domicile. They paint the fishermen of Brittany and the peasants of Picardy; and even when apparently interpreting Sweden, they only clothe their Parisian models in a Swedish garb. Those who returned to Stockholm turned their Parisian art into a Swedish art, but they have remained cosmopolitan until this day. Whilst there is something prosy and homely about Danish art, that of Sweden displays nervous elegance and cosmopolitan polish. Simplicity is in her eyes humdrum; she prefers light and brilliant notes. There, a naturalness and simplicity allows us to forget the difficulties of the brush: here, we chiefly receive the impression of a cleverly solved problem. There, the greatest moderation in colour, a soft all-pervading grey: here, a cunning play with delicate tones and gradations—a striving to render the most difficult effects of light with obedient hand. This tendency is particularly marked in the case of the landscape painters: Per Ekstróm (b. 1844), Niels Kreuger (b. 1858), Karl Nordstróm (b. 1865), Prince Eugen of Sweden (b. 1855), Axel Sjóberg Wallander (b. 1862), and Wahlberg (b. 1864). Nature in Sweden has not the idyllic softness, the veiled elegiac character, it displays in Denmark. It is more coquettish, southern and French, and the painters regard it also with French eyes.
As a painter of animals, Bruno Liljefors (b. 1860) created a sensation by his surprising pictures. Whatever his subjects—quails, capercailzies, dogs, hares, magpies or thrushes—he has caught the fleetest motions and the most transitory effects of light with the cleverness of a Japanese. With this exception, the Swedish painters cannot be classified according to “subjects.” They are “virtuosi,” calling every technical aspect of art their own—as well in fresco as in portrait painting. Oscar Bjórek (b. 1860), Ernst Josephson (b. 1851), Georg Pauli (b. 1855), Richard Bergh (b. 1858), Hanna Hirsch now Pauli (b. 1864) are the best-known names. Carl Larsson’s (b. 1853) decorative panneaux fascinate by their easy lightness and coquettish grace of execution. Ander Zorn (b. 1860), with his dazzling virtuosity, is as typical of Swedish as the prosaic simplicity of Johansen is of Danish art. His marine pictures, with their undulating waves and naked forms bathed in light, belong to the most surprising examples of the cleverness with which modern art can stereotype quivering motions; and the same boldness in handling his subjects, which triumphs over difficulties, makes his “interiors,” his portraits and etchings, objects of admiration to every painter’s eye. In his “Dance before the Window” all is vivacity and motion. His portrait of a “Peasant Woman” is a powerful harmony of sparkling yellow-red tones of colour. Besides these older masters who cleave to the most dazzling light effects, there are the younger artists of the school of Carl Larsson, who aspire more to decorative effects on a grander scale. Gustav Fjälstad (b. 1868) exhibited a picture in the Paris Exhibition of 1900 that stood out like mosaic among its surroundings. And great similarity in method has Hermann Normann, who, as a landscape painter, also imitates the classic style. (R. Mr.)
Norway
We enter a new world when in picture-galleries we pass to the Norwegian from the Swedish section. From the great city we are transported to nature, solemn and solitary, into a land of silence, where a rude, sparse population, a race of fishermen, snatches a scanty sustenance from the sea. The Norwegians also contributed for a time to the international market in works of art. They sent mainly genre pictures telling of the manners and customs of their country, or landscapes depicting the phenomena of Northern scenery. Adolf Tidemand (1814–1876) introduced his countrymen—the peasants and fishermen of the Northern coast—to the European public. We are introduced to Norwegian Christmas customs, accompany the Norseman on his nocturnal fishing expeditions, join the “Brudefaerd” across the Hardanger fjord, sit as disciples at the feet of the Norwegian sacristan. Ferdinand Fagerlin (b. 1825) and Hans Dahl are two other painters who, educated at Düsseldorf and settled in Germany, introduced the style of Knaus and Vautier to Norwegian art circles. Knud Badde (1808–1879), Hans Gude (b. 1825), Niels Bjórnsen Möller, Morten-Müller (b. 1828), Ludvig Munthe (1843–1896), and Adelsten Normann (b. 1848) are known as excellent landscape painters, who have faithfully portrayed the majestic mountain scenery and black pine forests of their native land, the cliffs that enclose the fjords, and the sparkling snowfields of the land of the midnight sun. But the time when actuality had to be well seasoned, and every picture was bound to have a spice of genre or the attraction of something out of the common to make it palatable, is past and gone. As early as the ’sixties Björnson was president of a Norwegian society which made it its chief business to wage war against the shallow conventionalities of the Düsseldorf school. Ibsen was vice-president. In the works of the more modern artists there is not a single trace of Düsseldorf influence. Especially in the ’eighties, when naturalism was at its zenith, we find the Norwegians its boldest devotees. They portrayed life as they found it, without embellishment; they did not trouble about plastic elegance, but painted the land of their home and its people in a direct, rough-hewn style. Like the people we meet in the North, giants with stalwart iron frames, callous hands, and sunburnt faces, with their sou’-westers and blue blouses, who resemble sons of a bygone heroic age, have the painters themselves—notably Niels Gustav Wentzel (b. 1859), Svend Jórgensen (b. 1861), Kolstoe (b. 1860). Christian Krohg—something primitive in the directness, in, one might almost say, the barbarous brutality with which they approach their subjects. They preferred the most glaring effects of plein-air; they revelled in all the hues of the rainbow.
But these very uncouth fellows, who treated the figures in their pictures with such rough directness, painted even in those
