Zealand Landscape., Johan Thomas Lundbye (1840)
Here is the Danish countryside as it is eulogised in the stories and poems of the Golden Age. Relics of the past spread across a gentle landscape, blue sky with light clouds and the delicate nuances of green and brown which are particularly observable in spring and autumn. Here there is no sign of the drama within nature which preoccupied contemporary German and French artists. Lundbye focuses on patriotic emotions in this encounter with a historical version of the Danish countryside. Lundbye presents Dragsholm Manor in red brick, as it was in the Middle Ages. In the painter’s day – and still today – it is a whitewashed baroque edifice.
