LUNDBYE, Johan Thomas

(b. 1818 Kalundborg, d. 1848 Bedsted)

Danish painter. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen, where he finished in 1842. He began exhibiting in 1835. In the years to come he would focus his painting on depicting landscapes.

He received a travel grant from the Academy in 1845, which was renewed a year later. He traveled through Germany (Altona, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Mainz, Strasbourg), over the Rhine to Switzerland (Basel, Geneva) to France (Marseille), and then to Italy.

He returned to Denmark after a year and half and bought a little farm near Helsingør. The First War of Schleswig, known in Denmark as the Three Years’ War broke out, and in the spring of 1848 he enlisted in the army like many other young artists. He died eight days later due to an accidental shot (or perhaps suicide).

He was a promising artist, inspired by the art historian Niels Laurits Høyen’s (1798-1870) call to develop a Danish nationalistic art by exploring as motif the characteristic landscapes, the historical buildings and monuments, and the simple, rural people of Denmark. He became one of his generation’s national romantic painters, along with Peter Christian Skovgaard and Lorenz Frølich, to regularly depict the landscape of Zeeland.

A Danish Coast

The painting shows a view from Kitnas on Roskilde Fjord, Zeeland. When the painter decided to depict a Danish coastline in an unusually monumental format, the scene was to represent the quintessential characteristic of the Danish countryside: the extensive coastlines. The scene does not, in fact, depict a single, specific site, the main motif is based on cliffs that the artist saw and sketched at the Roskilde Fjord. He adapted these cliffs, making them rather more monumental, and combined them with scenes from elsewhere.

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Kolas Wood, Vejrhoj

In this painting the signature tells us that the study was created on Vejrhoj, a landmark within the artist’s autobiographical landscape: his grandparents lived in the nearby town of Kalundborg, where he himself was born, and the place became a recurring motif in his pictures.

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Zeeland Landscape

In this painting, Lundbye have strived to express the overall qualities of the Danish countryside, and with his chosen title he seeks to emphasise the general nature of the scene. A central feature of the painting is the winding road, which may be interpreted as an expression of the artist’s existential ruminations.

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