Peder Balke

 

 

Peder Balke, at the National Gallery.

 

Balke was one of the first artists to venture to the vast, untrodden plains of the North Cape, the wall of rock on the edge of Norway, where he was overwhelmed by 'opulent beauties of nature and locations delivered to the eye and the mind'.  

 

There are hardly any people in these paintings: just mountains, coasts, sky and sea. The grandeur of the landscape, and the artist's subjective, emotional response to it, is the main theme, and in this, they are reminiscent of the work of Caspar David Friedrich as well as Edvard Much's paintings of Norwegian seas and skies. 

 

 

 

 



The Mountain Range, Trolltindene, about 1845

 

 

 



 

Seascape, 1860

North Cape, 1860s

North Cape, 1840s

North Cape, 1840s

Landscape from Finland with Sami and Reindeer, about 1850

Moonlight View of Stockholm, 1850.


Across the landing is Maggi Hambling's Walls of Water exhibition which offers parallels to Peder Balke's view of nature and which you can see here .