Event Item: 00057

'The Mirror of Nature' - Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910

Exhibition: 6th Oct 2007 to 20th Jan 2008

Source: http://www.smk.dk

This exhibition shows over 100 landscape paintings by the most important Nordic painters of the period, including Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Carl Larsson and Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

The exhibition largely presents the chronological development in landscape painting from the magnificent and romantic wilderness of nature of the 1840s, through the more registering, realistic approach, to the more evocative, introverted and subjective soul landscapes of the turn of the century.

The landscape in art has a long history, but as an independent theme in Nordic art it only became significant around 1800 when nature and naturalness was ascribed greater importance.

For the Nordic countries landscape painting gained particular symbolic value as the countries searched for a national identity. At the same time, landscape painting in the North was also open to influences from the rest of Europe, and it developed in the tension between the national and international.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Statens Museum for Kunst and the Nordic national galleries in Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo, and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Statens Museum for Kunst, Sølvgade 48-50,1307 Copenhagen, Denmark