Lot 305: ADOLPH TIDEMAND NORWEGIAN, 1814-1876

signed, dated and inscribed A. Tidemand 1853 / Df. l.l.

oil on canvas

93.5 by 80.5cm., 36 3/4 by 31 3/4 in.

Lorentz Dietrichsen, Adolph Tidemand, hans Liv og hans Verk, Christiania, 1878, pp. 17-18, discussed; pp. 192 & 218, listed

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

Düsseldorfer Kunstverein (donated by the artist)

Encouraged to visit Sweden by the Swedish painters who like himself had been attracted to Düsseldorf to study and work, Tidemand travelled through Sweden between 1852 and 1854, recording what he saw with his customary assiduity.

Depicting two boys resting on moorlands in Mora, Sweden, Boys from Mora is Tidemand's most important composition to have been inspired by this journey. The present work is the fourth of five versions of the subject and, according to Dietrichsen, the canvas was prepared by the Swedish artist Bengt Nordenberg. The first three versions listed by Dietrichsen were painted one year earlier in 1852. The fifth version was painted in 1860.

Tidemand's interest in the costumes of the two young country peasant boys in the present work is evident: the rough textures of the boys' clothes is almost palpable. Despite the coarseness of their garments, however, the overall message is one of hope. The sitters' youthful complexions convey a worthy intelligence as well as handsome good looks, an expression that typically describes the children that he depicted in his work (fig. 1). To boot, the open lakeland setting with the sun breaking through the clouds above suggests an optimistic future for this young pair.

After five years study under Eckersberg (lot 300) in Copenhagen, in 1837 Tidemand, like his fellow countryman J.C. Dahl (lots 302-304) before him, settled in Germany. At the end of four years as a student at the Düsseldorf Academy, in 1841 he travelled to Rome. Returning to Norway the following year he determined to become a history painter. A study tour of Gudbrandsdalen, Sogn and Hardanger in 1843, however, left him with such a vivid array of pictorial images of country life in remote Norwegian valleys, that he devoted himself to the depiction of these essential aspects of his homeland. In 1845 he settled for good in Düsseldorf, establishing himself as the foremost Norwegian figurative painter of his generation. His return there overlapped with the presence of another influential Norwegian painter, Hans Fredrik Gude (lot 309), an artist with whom he collaborated on a number of major compositions, notably Brudeferden i Hardanger of 1848 (Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo).

The traditional rural Norwegian subjects that are the very essence of Tidemand's paintings were the result of his frequent visits to Norway (he returned there fourteen times after 1850). On his travels around the country he recorded in the minutest detail, dress, people and their way of life, houses and furniture, implements and working habits. The copious notebooks that he filled he then worked up in oil in his Düsseldorf studio.

The almost ethnographic deliberation with which Tidemand approached his subject matter coincided with the national romantic ideology that flourished in Norway from the 1840s onwards. The new awareness of the national and local elements in society was fuelled by the publication of a number of influential texts, including Andreas Faye's collection of Norwegian poems in the 1830s, Rudolf Keyser's treatise On the Origin and Kinship of the Norwegian People in 1839, and the publication in 1841 of the first collections of Norwegian folk tales by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. Such works encouraged a wide and lively interest in language and dialects, myths, legends and poetry as well as a ready and very receptive market for Tidemand's studied Norwegian subject matter.