During the Romantic Era landscape painting reached the height of its popularity through artists such as J M W Turner in Great Britain, Caspar David Friedrich in Germany and Johan Christian Dahl in Norway. Whilst to this day their paintings continue to fascinate our imagination, a whole new artistic vision emerged during this era which would prove to have a determining influence on modern art. It was then that painters - apart from carefully observing their natural environment - also started to look within, focusing on the inner self.
Wild seas and volcanic eruptions; quiet moonlit nights and serene meadows. Landscapes can have both an historic dimension and feature traces of national history, as well as prompt a more religious, spiritual experience. In its varied manifestations landscape art remains an important genre within the visual arts.
The influence of Romanticism is unmistakably omnipresent in our modern world. The movement, which included the arts as well as intellectual thought, swept through Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards. Romanticism in the North offers a broad overview of landscape painting from that epoch-making period. For the first time the Scandinavian and Dutch varieties of Romanticism are also placed within an international context to ask: how do these lesser known but highly gifted landscape artists relate to their more celebrated contemporaries?
