Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting study day from the London Art History Society held at the Foundling Museum looking at Scandinavian art in the 19th century.   Kathy McLauchlan started by giving an overview of the period and how the art culture in the various countries operated with royal collections, academies and independent art societies called Konstforening. She then moved through the period chronologically which also fell into geographical areas over the next three talks.   The pattern of development was similar to Europe as a whole partly as the period was so dominated by Paris. We looked at how tastes moved from the Classical to the naturalistic, through Impressionism and social realism to Symbolism. It was fun to discover new artists and I particularly fell for Christoffer Eckersberg’s clean detailed works very evocative of one of his teachers, David. However I chose this wonderful portrait Frederick Sodring by Christen Kobke which I loved to illustrate the post.

Intriguing online lecture from ARTscapades on 19th century Danish painting. This was a topic I knew very little about but David Jackson from the University of Leeds took us clearly through why this was called a Gold Age despite it being a politically very difficult period for the country. He then showed us a selection of beautiful paintings grouped under the three main subjects they worked on portraits, landscapes and genre works and talked about how these reflected the political situation. I loved the clarity of the pictures and wasn’t surprised that one of the leading artists C.W. Eckersberg has been trained by Ingres in Paris. I will certainly look out for these works in future and it seems like a good excuse to go back to Copenhagen.