Thomas Fearnley – my daily art display

Wilhelm Ferdinand Bendz

Somebody just asked me how I came to write about a certain artist. In the case of today’s blog it was just a strange coincidence………

In November 2012 I wrote a blog about the Barber Institute, an English art museum on the Birmingham University campus. The reason for visiting this gallery was to take in the exhibition of the Norwegian painter, with the English-sounding name, Thomas Fearnley.

Church at Ramsau by Thomas Fearnley (1832)

As I walked into the exhibition that day, the first painting I saw was a plein air oil on paper, laid on canvas work which Fearnley completed in 1832 while on his trek from Germany to Italy. Fearnley painted this finished composition from nature in September 1832. The artist was travelling to Italy when he stopped at the village of Ramsau. The title of the work was simply Ramsau. This was a town I knew well from the days I travelled around southern Bavaria. It was a beautiful painting, and I vividly remember the beautiful depiction as if I had just seen it today. It is a truly magnificent landscape work.

Wilhelm Bendz by Christen Kobke (c.1830)

The reason I mention this work is because the artist I am looking at today, Wilhelm Ferdinand Bendz, also produced an artwork featuring that same church with its mountainous background. Bendz was principally a painter of figure subjects and his landscapes are rare. This view was painted in September 1832 when he too was making his way from Munich to Rome. He stopped briefly at Ramsau in Austria and made several lively sketches of the church and mountains. His painting was dated the same month and same year as Fernley’s painting ! More about that coincidence later.

Winter Landscape from Funnen by Wilhelm Bendz (1831)

Wilhelm Ferdinand Bendz was born in the Danish town of Odense on the island of Funen on March 20^th 1804 His father was Lauritz Martin Bendz, at one time, chief of police in Odense and High Court Judge in Funen and Langeland. His mother, his father’s second wife, was Regine Christence Bang. Wilhelm had four brothers and four sisters as well as three stepsisters and one stepbrother from his father’s first marriage.

A Smoking Party by Wilhelm Bendz

Wilhelm Bendz, at the age of sixteen, having completed his schooling in Odense, travelled to Copenhagen where he enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and studied there from 1820 to 1825. Here he studied under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, whowent on to lay the foundation for the period of art known as the Golden Age of Danish Painting, and is referred to as the “Father of Danish painting”. In his final year at the academy, he submitted work in an attempt to win the Academy’s prestigious gold medal prize which came with a travel scholarship. However, at the time, the Academy only awarded the Gold Medal to history paintings, which at the time was considered to be the most respected painting genre. Bendz, however, decided to concentrate on portraiture and genre works and his early paintings would often portray his artist colleagues and their daily lives.

A Young Artist (Ditlev Blunck) Examining a Sketch in a Mirror by Wilhelm Bendz

One such work was his 1826 painting entitled A Young Artist (Ditlev Blunck) Examining a Sketch in a Mirror. Wilhelm Bendz was a great believer in artists’ new role in life. He believed they were no longer simply specialist craftsmen but, for him, artists should be viewed as intellectual workers. The artist in this picture is Bendz’s fellow Academy student, Ditlev Blunck, who is engaged in painting a portrait of fellow student, Jørgen Sonne, a painter who would become known for his battle scenes. The painting which Bendz completed in 1826 depicts young Ditlev Blunck, a fellow Academy student of Bendz, taking a break from painting to examine a sketch he has made for the portrait. The artist is standing in a crowded room surrounded by his tools and paraphernalia: a paintbox, palette, and easel as well as a skull and a sketchbook suggesting that careful studies had preceded the final painting. Only the back of the painting can be seen with the front seen only in the mirror. It is believed that the depiction is indicative of the era’s view of art as a mirror held up to life and signals that his work is serious, and requires thorough study before execution.

Model Class at the Copenhagen Academy by Wilhelm Bendz (1826)

Bendz completed Model Class at the Copenhagen Academy in 1826 and it is considered to be one of his greatest works.

Christian Holm by William Bendz (1826)

Another of Bendz’s works which focused on artists at work was one he completed in 1826 – a portrait of his fellow Academy student, Christian Holm, at work on his painting. Christian Holm became a well-known Danish painter known primarily for his animal and hunting scenes.

A Sculptor in his Studio Working from Life by Wilhelm Bendz (1827)

A Sculptor in His Studio which he completed in 1827 is one of Bendz’s masterpieces. It depicts the working environment of a sculptor with meticulous attention to tools, materials, and the creative process. The painting demonstrates his skill with complex interior lighting. The depiction is of sculptor, Christen Christensen, at work. Christensen was a Danish sculptor and medallist, who studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and was at the same time articled to the sculptor Nicolai Dajon. He won the Academy’s small and large silver medals in 1824, the small gold medal in 1825 and finally the large gold medal in 1827.

Interior from Amaliegade, Captain Carl Ludvig Bendz Standing and Dr. Jacob Christian Bendz Seated by Wilhelm Bendz (ca. 1829)

Bendz’s two brothers featured in an internal scene, in Bendz’s genre work entitled Interior from Amaliegade.

The Raffenberg Family by Wilhelm Bendz (1830)

The Waagepetersen Family by Wilhelm Bendz

Bendz often received lucrative commissions for family portraits.

Artist in the Evening at Finck’s Coffee House in Munich by Wilhelm Bendz (1832)

After leaving the Academy, Bendz was employed as an assistant at Christoffer Eckersberg’s studio. In late 1830 Bendz won an award which granted him a travel scholarship allowing him to leave Denmark and travel to southern Europe. After short stop-overs at Dresden and Berlin, he settled for a year in Munich, a city which had developed into a vibrant centre for the arts. This opportunity exposed Wilhelm to new artistic influences and techniques as well as knowledge of contemporary German painting, known as the Munich School, which seems to have influenced his style. It was here that he completed one of his most valued paintings, a composed group portrait entitled Artist in the Evening at Finck’s Coffee House in Munich.

The Church at Ramsau by Wilhelm Bendz (1832)

In the autumn of 1832, twenty-eight-year-old Bendz left Munich and continued his exhausting journey over the Alps towards Rome. On this journey he was accompanied by Joseph Petzl, a German genre painter and Thomas Fearnley, a Norwegian romantic painter. It is here that I return to the start of the blog and the two similar depictions by Fearnley and Bendz of the church at Ramsau. The answer as to how Bendz and Fearnley completed paintings depicting similar views of the church in the mountains at the same time is now clear. They were fellow travellers and both had decided to record the beautiful scene.

Mountain Landscape by Wilhelm Bendz (1831)

The three men finally crossed the Alps and made their way to Venice. The extremely difficult journey took its toll on Bendz and after moving from Venice to Vicenza to stay with a friend before heading to Rome, he collapsed and died of a lung infection on November 14th 1832 aged 28. Wilhelm Bendz’s artistic contribution was not appreciated during his short lifetime but his legacy grew significantly in the decades following, as art historians recognized his technical skill and unique perspective on the Danish Golden Age. Bendz’s technical skill was in the way he handled light, especially in interior scenes and how he enhanced the artistic achievements of the Danish Golden Age. His works displayed both academic precision and personal expression. He was a master at depicting the social life of artists and intellectuals, and this artwork provided valuable visual documentation of cultural circles in Copenhagen during the 1820s and early 1830s.

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Part 1.

I had a short city break in Birmingham the other day when I had intended to visit some of the main art galleries. Unfortunately, the main Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in the centre of the city was closed until late April, for essential electrical works and so I was able to concentrate my cultural journey on a visit to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the centre of the Birmingham University Campus. I had been here once before, five years ago and especially fell in love with two of the paintings. The Barber Institute is a smaller gallery in comparison to the main one in the Birmingham centre and yet it is full of artistic treasures by the most famous artists. In my next three blogs I will introduce you to and tell you about some of the wonderful paintings in their permanent collection, so as to tempt you to visit the museum.

See the source image — *The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, England.*

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is housed in one of Birmingham’s finest Art Deco buildings and was opened in 1939. The architect tasked with designing the building was Robert Atkinson, one of Britain’s leading architects of the 1920s and ’30s. The building is laid out around the central music auditorium, surrounded by corridors. On the Ground floor these form offices and lecture halls for the Departments of Music and History of Art, as well as a dedicated Art History library. The galleries occupy the same space on the first floor, approached by a stunning travertine staircase directly opposite the entrance.

The first painting I want to present to you is one of my all-time favourite landscape works. The 1832 work, entitled Ramsau, is by Thomas Fearnley. Fearnley was born in Norway, but studied abroad, often with his fellow countryman Johan Christian Dahl. It was whilst working alongside Dahl that Fearnley developed the habit of painting directly en plein air. Fearnley was travelling to Italy when he and his party stopped at the village of Ramsau, a small town located on the Königssee in the district of Berchtesgadener Land in Bavaria. In the painting we can see the road winding and disappearing around a corner of the village before we catch a glimpse of it again as it heads off towards their destination, the snow-covered Alps and the beautiful snow-capped Hoher Göll, which straddles the border between the German state of Bavaria and the Austrian city of Salzburg. It is such a beautifully tranquil scene. In the middle ground of the depiction, we see a lone farmer collecting hay. Such hard work was so important so as to have food for his animals during the harsh and bitterly cold winter, which was fast approaching. This en plein air work would have taken Fearnley several sittings during the week-long stay, on each occasion adding another layer of colour.

*The Wrath of Ahasuerus* *by Jan Steen (c.1670)*

I have always loved the works of the Dutch Golden Age painter, Jan Steen, so I was pleased to see one of his works in the Barber Institute’s collection. It was not one of his exuberant genre scenes but a Biblical painting. It was his painting The Wrath of Ahasuerus which he completed around 1670. The characters who appear in the painting come from the Old Testament Book of Esther. The depiction before us is an episode in the life of the Persian king Ahasuerus and his Jewish wife Esther. King Ahasuerus had sought a new wife after his queen, Vashti, had refused to obey him, and Esther, the adopted daughter of the Jew Mordecai, was chosen for her beauty. The subject of the painting is from Esther vii, 1-7. Haman, the king’s First Minister had issued a decree that all the Jews in Persia should be killed. Esther, the wife of the king, held a banquet and at it she confessed that she was a Jew, and that she too was threatened by Haman. So we see in the painting, on hearing what his wife had to say about Haman, her husband jumps up in a violent reaction to what he has just heard. Ahaseurus explosive and exaggerated gesture, eyes bulging, red in the face, fists clenched, jumps up knocking over a vase and the peacock pie. Haman, on the left, cowers away from the king’s fury. The peacock is a symbol of pride and is a reference to Haman’s fallen pride and his downfall. The king ordered Haman to be hung. This story of Esther’s triumph over the evil Haman was popular with the Dutch people who could see the similarity between her battle and their plight against the mighty, and in their eyes, the evil Spanish invaders and occupiers of their country, being a similar story.

Symphony in White, No. III — *Symphony in White No. III by James McNeill Whistler (c.1867)*

James McNeill Whistler completed Symphony in White No. 3 in 1867 and it is now part of the Barber Institute collection. It was thought to have been originally entitled Two Little White Girls. Two women are depicted in the painting. One, sitting on a sofa, is Joanna Heffernan, Whistler’s mistress. The other, resting on the floor in the cream/yellow dress, is Millie Jones, the wife of an actor friend. Laying on the floor is an Oriental fan which is a reminder of the popular Japonisme cult of the time. Japonisme was a French term that referred to the popularity and influence of Japanese art and design among a number of Western European artists in the nineteenth century. Whistler had embarked on this painting in July 1865 and within a month, he had completed the preliminary sketches and by September he had completed the work and had signed and dated it.

However, he was not happy with what he saw and began to rework it and Whistler was not finally satisfied with it until 1867 when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. He painted over the final “5” in the original date, and replaced it with a “7”, to mark the changes it had undergone.

Whistler chose the term ‘Symphony’ to highlight to visitors to the exhibition that it was purely a study in colour and the connection of two branches of the Arts, music and art.. It was the first of Whistler’s paintings to be exhibited with a musical title. And so, why was it entitled “No. 3”?

The reason behind this numerical conundrum was that Whistler’s 1863 painting was given the title White Girl but Paul Mantz, a French art historian and writer for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, called it ‘Symphonie du blanc‘, and so it was later renamed Symphony in White. No. 1.

*Symphony in White No.2 by Whistler. Tate Britain.*

In 1864 Whistler completed a second similar work entitled The Little White Girl, which later became known as Symphony in White. No. 2. In their 1908 biography of Whistler, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell, make the point that this may have been a factor that influenced Whistler in his choice of titles for the third in the series.

The work was greatly admired by all who saw it. It is thought that Deagas drew inspiration from Whistler’s painting when he worked on his painting, Portrait de Mlle Eugénie Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source”

However, there were some critics who were not altogether in love with the work. Philip Hamerton, an English artist, art critic and author, writing for the Saturday Review on 1 June 1867, remarked:

“…In the “Symphony in White No. III.” by Mr. Whistler there are many dainty varieties of tint, but it is not precisely a symphony in white. One lady has a yellowish dress and brown hair and a bit of blue ribbon, the other has a red fan, and there are flowers and green leaves. There is a girl in white on a white sofa, but even this girl has reddish hair; and of course, there is the flesh colour of the complexions…”

Whistler was horrified by what had been written in the journal and wrote a letter to the editor but he would not print it. However in Whistler’s own book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, he reproduced the letter in which he had written:

“…How pleasing that such profound prattle should inevitably find its place in print!…Bon Dieu! did this wise person expect white hair and chalked faces ? And does he then, in his astounding consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of F, F, F ? . . . Fool!…”

*Two Peasants binding Faggots by Pieter Brueghel (c.1615)*

For my last offering in Part One of my blog relating to my best-loved works in the collection of the Barber Institute I have reverted to one of my favourite painters, Pieter Brueghel the Younger. He was the son of one of the greatest sixteenth century artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and the brother of Jan Breughel. This amusing and fascinating painting entitled Two Peasants binding Faggots, was completed around 1615, and it was the type of work which was popular in the seventeenth century. It was entitled Two Peasants binding Faggots. It is a depiction of peasants binding a bundle of stolen branches for firewood whilst their fellow accomplice is seen in the background cutting the branches of a tree. The two peasants in the foreground glance around furtively and from that we gather that they are up to no good, The larger of the two, on the left, is stout symbolising the sin of gluttony whilst his thinner and gaunt accomplice with a paler face and wearing a codpiece has a bandage around his head and it is thought that Brueghel has depicted this as it relates to the Flemish proverb “to have toothache behind the ears” meaning a malingerer. On the ground, next to the gaunt-looking man, is a pipe which is a traditional phallic symbol and represents the sin of lechery.

Bruegel Netherlandish Proverbs@0 — *Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525)*. Staatliche Museen Berlin.

The artist’s father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, had painted a large work, Netherlandish Proverbs, in 1559, which featured a large number of similar characters each representing various Netherlandish proverbs which today is part of the Staatliche Museen collection in Berlin.

…………….to be continued.

The Grindelwald Glacier by Thomas Fearnley

Grindelwald Glacier by Thomas Fearnley (1838a) — Grindelwald Glacier by Thomas Fearnley (1838)

Today I am concluding my look at the life of Thomas Fearnley and for those of you have just landed on this page, my introduction to the Norwegian artist’s life was the subject for My Daily Art Display blog of November 24th.

The date is 1832 and that September, Fearnley, who along with his fellow artists, the Dane, William Bendz and the German painter Joseph Petzl, had just left the Bavarian Alpine village of Ramsau and were beginning their long and strenuous trek on foot over the Alps to Italy. So why had this Norwegian artist and his friends set off on this gruelling journey? Why did Fearnley spent most of his life wandering around Europe? The answer probably lies in the fact that although the Norwegian landscape offered many beautiful vistas to paint, there were few commissions to be had from wealthy patrons in his native Norway. Whereas in the art capitals of Europe such as Paris, London, Rome and Munich there were a large number of affluent patrons who would pay generous sums for landscape works.

Fearnley and his travelling companions headed for Rome but first stopped off in Venice in the late October of 1832. The three travellers split up at this point as Fearnley was determined to carry on until he reached the Italian capital whereas Bendz wanted to stay in Venice. As I told you in my last blog, William Bendz took ill in Venice but left the city and went to Vicenza where his health deteriorated rapidly and he died of typhoid, just ten days after he had parted from his friends. Fearnley finally arrived in Rome in November 1832, just before his 30^th birthday. He settled down in the Italian capital, living amongst the Danish and German artistic community. Fearnley made Rome his base for the next three years but was constantly setting off from there on his artistic trips. In 1883, along with a Danish friend, he left the capital on a long walking tour of Sicily and on his way back to Rome, visited Naples, Sorrento and Capri. This journey along the Amalfi coast had been carried out by his erstwhile mentor John Christian Dahl, ten years earlier.

Fearnley loved the practice of en plein air oil sketching and he followed earlier practitioners of this kind of art such as Claude-Joseph Vernet, Pierre-Henri Valenciennes and the Welsh artist Richard Wilson, all of whom had pioneered en plein air sketching whilst they were based in Rome. The other aspect of this art, which Fearnley believed in, was to select views for painting that were “fresh”, even unorthodox rather than painting views which had been done so many times over by other landscape artists. Another aspect of art which fascinated Fearnley was how various meteorological conditions affected the light and the view of the landscapes. He strived for a true depiction of the skies and the cloud formations and was only too aware of the fast change in what he was looking at, due to varying changes in the weather conditions. Having left the colder, duller and wetter climate of Northern Europe and Scandinavia he was now able to appreciate and take advantage of the warmer, sunnier climes of Italy which allowed him a greater opportunity to paint outdoors for lengthy periods of time.

In 1835, after his three year sojourn in Italy, Fearnley decided to move on. He travelled north via Florence to Switzerland where he spent most of the summer studying the breathtaking Alpine scenery and especially the glaciers at Grindelwald, which would be depicted in his famous 1838 large studio oil painting entitled The Grindelwald Glacier, which is My Daily Art Display’s featured painting today. From this Alpine area he once again moves north, crossing the Alps, heading for Paris, arriving in September of that year. Whilst in Paris, he exhibits three of his works, including the “yet to be completed” Grindelwald Glacier painting. During Fearnley’s stay in Rome he had met and befriended a number of wealthy English art lovers. Many were rich aristocrats who were taking part in the Grand Tour. It could have been this that made him decide to travel from Paris to London in the spring of 1836. Whilst in the English capital, Fearnley took in the Royal Academy May Exhibition and at this exhibition he would have seen major works by the likes of Turner, Constable, David Wilkie and William Etty. However the artist who most impressed Fearnley was the English landscape painter Augustus Wall Callcott. This R.A. Exhibition was a special one as there were more than 1200 paintings being exhibited and it was the last one to be held at Somerset House. Whilst in England Fearnley made a number of painting trips and in August 1837 he, along with his fellow artist friend, Charles West Cope, visited the Lake District. He visited Derwentwater, Coniston and Patterdale, all the time recording the views in oil sketches. In 1838 Fearnley became the founder member of the Etching Club, an artists’ society founded in London. The club published illustrated editions of works by authors such as Oliver Goldsmith, Shakespeare, and Milton. Other well known artists who became members of this club were the Pre-Raphaelite painters, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.

In 1838, Fearnley exhibited his now completed work The Grindelwald Glacier at the Royal Academy. His wanderlust continued unabated and he leaves London in the summer for Germany. He first visits Berlin and then on to Dresden where he once again meets up with his former mentor and teacher J C Dahl. He makes a brief stop-over in Switzerland before returning to his homeland, Norway, where he lives in the capital Christiania for the next two years. Fearnley became a member of the Christiania Art Society. On July 15^th 1840, he married Cecilia Catharine Andresen, the daughter of one of his patrons from previous years, the banker and Member of Parliament Nicolai Andresen. In the autumn the couple went to Amsterdam, where they stayed for one year, and where their only child, a son Thomas, was born. During their stay Fearnley becomes infected with typhus and on January 16^th 1842 he died, aged just 39 years old. He was buried in a Munich cemetery but 80 years later his son took the initiative to have his father’s remains brought back to Norway, and in 1922 the tomb was moved to Our Saviour’s Cemetery in Oslo.

Fearnley’s painting, which at the time was entitled The Upper Grindelwald Glacier, Canton Berne, Switzerland, was started in 1836 and although not finished was shown at the Paris Salon that year. It was two years later in 1838 that the painting appeared at the Royal Academy Exhibition, which was being held in its new home at the National Gallery, the R.A. having just moved from Somerset House that year. This beautiful painting is dated 1838 which leads us to believe that the original work started in 1836 was re-worked in late 1838 whilst the artist was in London. This large studio work derives from a number of oil sketches which Fearnley made in late 1835 whilst he was in the Grindelwald valley. The spectacular view we are looking at is of the upper Grindelwald glacier, which lies on the northern side of the Bernese Alps. In the middle ground we can just make out a lone shepherd silhouetted against the stunning white ice peaks of the glacier. In the foreground of the work we see that Fearnley has put a lot of effort into depicting the flora, amongst which are dotted the shepherd’s flock. Although my attached picture might not clearly show it, the artist’s signature “Fearnley” is on the rock in the right foreground, next to a fern ! Coincidence or a witty visual play on his name?

Ramsau by Thomas Fearnley

I have said on a number of occasions that one of the joys of visiting art galleries is when you suddenly come across one you did not know existed. It is always a pleasure to go to the large and famous galleries such as the Louvre, Prado, and London’s National Gallery to name just a few but I find it exhilarating when I come across, often by accident, the smaller, more hidden-away ones such as London’s Wallace Collection or the Musée Marmottan Monet Gallery in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. I had visited Birmingham before and visited the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery but a fortnight ago I decided to visit the city again and have a look at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts which is on the University of Birmingham campus. If I had not decided on that visit I would never have come across a divine portraiture work of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun which I enthused about in my last blog and which was part of their permanent collection. However the reason for me going to the gallery was to see an exhibition of the Norwegian painter Thomas Fearnley and today I want to talk a little about the life of this artist and look at one of the paintings which was in the exhibition.

Thomas Fearnley, although an English-sounding name, was Norwegian. He was a romantic painter who was born in 1802 in Frederikshald, Norway, a small town in the south east of the country, a few miles from the Norwegian-Swedish border. The town has since been renamed Halden. The Fearnley family maintained its custom of naming its eldest sons Thomas and so both his father and grandfather were named Thomas. His grandfather was an English timber merchant from Heckmondwike, a small mill town near Leeds, and who with his family moved to Norway in 1753 as a representative for a trading company based in the English seaport of Hull. Fearnley’s father Thomas was also a merchant and married Maren Sophie Paus, a woman from the important Norwegian Paus dynasty. Thomas was the eldest of their eight children.

Thomas Fearnley’s father owned a shop in Frederikshald and earned his money as an importer/exporter, importing woollen and cloth goods from England and exporting Norwegian lumber. At the age of five, young Thomas went to live with his maternal aunt, Karen and her husband, Georg Frederik Hagemann in Christiania, (now known as Oslo). The couple had no children of their own and were delighted to have Thomas live with them. When Thomas was twelve years old he was enrolled as a pupil in the cadet corps of the Military Academy. At the Academy, one of the subjects Thomas was taught was drawing. It was soon clear that he had a talent for drawing and excelled in these lessons. However he achieved less in his other subjects especially in the military training and he left the Academy in the spring of 1819.

As his father and his father’s father before him had all been merchants, it was expected that Thomas would follow suit and at the age of sixteen, for a while, he took on the role of a young merchant in his uncle’s business. However Thomas had not given up his love of drawing and every evening he would attend an elementary art class in Christiania, where he spent time copying still lifes and portraits painted by various artists.

To become an artist in Norway was quite difficult as there were no major art academies where aspiring artists could learn their trade. It could well be this factor, which forced Fearnley to travel extensively through Europe visiting major art institutions. In late 1821 he travelled to Copenhagen and enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. It was here that he came across Dutch landscape paintings of Nordic scenes by the likes of Jacob van Ruisdael. It was these seventeenth century works, which influenced Fearnley and it was these depictions of Nordic landscapes, which would play an important role in Norwegian art and Norwegian artists such as Thomas Fearnley.

In 1823, aged twenty-one, Fearnley left Copenhagen and went to live in Stockholm where he attended the Drawing Class at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts enrolling on a four-year course. During this period Thomas received a number of commissions for his landscape work including a three-painting commission from the country’s royal family. During his time at the Academy, he would take the opportunity, during summer breaks in the art course, to travel back to Norway to sketch the wild and rugged landscape of his homeland. It was at this juncture in his artistic career that he completed his first en plein air oil sketch. It was also during one of these visits to western Norway, in 1826, that he first encountered another artist on an art tour. He was Johan Christian Dahl, who would become the first great romantic painter in Norway, and one of the great European artists of all time. Dahl is now looked upon as the founder of the “golden age” of Norwegian painting.

Fearnley’s four-year art course at the Copenhagen Academy ended in 1829 and Fearnley continued with his European travels, this time going to Dresden. It was in this city that Fearnley again meets Dahl and they soon become friends and Thomas received some artistic tuition from him. One of Dahl’s other artistic friends and near neighbour was the German artist Casper David Friedrich. Fearnley spent time studying Friedrich’s work and one can see in a number of Fearnley’s landscape works a characteristic employed by Friedrich – figures in the paintings are seen from behind. Fearnley studied the different ways in which Dahl and Friedrich worked. J C Dahl used rapid brushstrokes in his paintings whilst Casper Friedrich was much slower and more methodical and his landscapes often had religious connotations. The study of these two great artists was to influence Fearnley’s art in the future.

From Dresden Fearnley travelled to Prague, Nuremberg and the lake district of Salzburg before finally settling in Munich in 1830. He was to remain in the Bavarian city for two years often travelling south to the foothills of the Bavarian Alps on painting trips. Following his two-year sojourn in Munich he and two other fellow artist Wihelm Bendz and Joseph Petzl set off on foot at the end of August 1832 on their 700 kilometre trek to Italy, passing through the Bavarian alpine village of Ramsau, which is the setting for my Daily Art Display’s featured painting today. The en plein air oil on paper, laid on canvas, sketch was completed by Thomas Fearnley within a week in 1832 and is simply entitled Ramsau. This was the first painting I came across when I entered the gallery of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, which was staging Thomas Fearnley’s exhibition In front of Nature. It was, by far, my favourite of all his works on show and was of great interest to me as I have visited the picturesque Alpine village of Ramsau on a number of occasions when I toured around Berchtesgadener Land in southern Bavaria.

The sketch is dated September 20^th 1832 and diaries kept by Wilhelm Bendz record that it was the last day the intrepid trio stayed in the village before heading across the Alps to Italy. In the picture we can see the road winding and disappearing around a corner of the village before we catch a glimpse of it again as it heads off towards their destination, the snow-covered Alps. There is a beautiful stillness about this picture. In the left middle ground we see a solitary farmer collecting hay, which will be needed for the harsh and bitterly cold winter, which is fast approaching. In the background we see the majestic snow-capped mountain, Hoher Göll, which straddles the border between the German state of Bavaria and the Austrian city of Salzburg. This en plein air work would have taken Fearnley several sittings during the week-long stay, on each occasion adding another layer of colour.

A Church at Ramsau, Austria by Wilhelm Bendz (c.1830)

It is interesting to note that whilst the intrepid trio were in Ramsau William Bendz also completed an en plein air oil sketch of the village from almost the same vantage point used by Fearnley. Bendz was principally a figure painter and this landscape work of his is a comparative rarity. You will see from Bendz’s picture that unlike the deliberate and carefully detailed picture painted by Fearnley over a seven-day period, the foreground and some other areas of Bendz’s work were hastily sketched in and the work would probably have been completed within a day or two. William Bendz’s work, which was dated September 1830, two years earlier than Fearnley’s sketch, and entitled The Church of Ramsau, Austria, can be found in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

In my next blog I will conclude my look at the life of Thomas Fearnley and follow his journey through Europe visiting the Neapolitan and Amalfi Coasts as well as visiting England and travelling around the Lake District.

To end on a slightly sad note, Fearnley’s companion on his trek to Italy, which started in September 1832, Wilhelm Bendz, made it to Venice but soon after, in the November of that same year, on reaching Vincenza, he took ill and died from a lung infection. Bendz had noted in his diary that the road to Rome was hard, the weather conditions unfavourable and at times extremely harsh and the walking very strenuous and the exertion obviously took the ultimate toll of him.