The Düsseldorf School and the Swedish painters

The Düsseldorf School is the name given to the painting taught at the art academy in Düsseldorf in the mid-19th century: careful drawing, narrative compositions and a smooth, richly detailed surface. Many Swedish artists studied there, among them Marcus Larson, Kilian Zoll, Amalia Lindegren and Gustaf Cederström, and the period c. 1850–1880 in Swedish art is often called the Düsseldorf era. Its genre pictures and history paintings shaped generations’ image of Sweden.

Facts

Why Düsseldorf?

In the mid-19th century the art academy in Düsseldorf was one of Europe’s most popular art schools. Under the direction of Wilhelm von Schadow it had developed a thorough and practical teaching, in which one learned to draw carefully, compose narrative scenes and paint with a smooth, detailed surface. The landscape painter Andreas Achenbach became a model for how nature could be made dramatic, with storms, waterfalls and dark skies.

For Scandinavians the city was especially attractive. The Norwegians Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude, who together painted The Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord in 1848, had shown that Nordic folk life and Nordic nature could become great art. The Academy of Arts in Stockholm was considered old-fashioned, Düsseldorf was closer and cheaper than Paris, and there was already a Nordic colony. The artists’ club Malkasten, founded in 1848, became a meeting place for Swedes, Norwegians and Germans. The influence reached as far as America: Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware was painted in Düsseldorf in 1851.

How they painted in Düsseldorf

A large painting often took months. First came small sketches of ideas and a colour sketch in oil, then a large number of studies of figures, hands, faces and drapery from models. The composition was transferred to the large canvas by means of a grid, and the picture was built up in layers: an underpainting in browns and greys, then the colours and finally thin, transparent glazes that gave depth and lustre.

The smooth surface, in which the brushstrokes are barely visible, was a sign of skill. It was precisely this that the next generation turned against. The open-air painters of the 1880s wanted the brushstroke to show and the picture to bear traces of the work. Many of the young also studied not at the academy itself but privately in the studios of established painters, where they saw how a painting grew from sketch to finished canvas.

Landscape as drama: Marcus Larson

Marcus Larson, born in 1825, studied in Düsseldorf in the early 1850s and became the most dramatic of the Swedish landscape painters. He painted rapids, stormy seas, ships on fire and moonlight with strong contrasts: a dark foreground against a bright area further in, glowing fire against black clouds. Waterfall in Småland of 1856, in the Nationalmuseum, turns a Swedish landscape into a spectacle. He died in London in 1864, only 38 years old.

Larson shows that Düsseldorf painting was not merely dry and detailed. It also contained a wild, Romantic side; compare the guide to Romanticism and Realism.

Folk life: Zoll, Nordenberg and Lindegren

Genre painting depicted weddings, markets, church journeys and the home on a Sunday evening. Kilian Zoll from Skåne was influenced by Tidemand’s pictures and painted peasants from Halland and Dalarna in festive dress, and Bengt Nordenberg depicted peasant life in Blekinge and Skåne and remained in Düsseldorf for the rest of his life. The peasants in the pictures are clean, cheerful and neatly dressed. It was the townspeople’s ideal image of a countryside that was just then beginning to change.

Amalia Lindegren studied in Paris and Düsseldorf and became one of the most appreciated genre painters of her time. Her Sunday Evening in a Dalarna Cottage of 1860, in the Nationalmuseum, shows several generations gathered in a cottage. She was elected to the Academy of Arts in 1856 and made her living from her art, and in 1864 the Academy opened a department for female students.

History painting: The Funeral Procession of Charles XII

History painting was regarded as the highest art form. Gustaf Cederström had been an officer before he studied in Düsseldorf and then in Paris. His The Funeral Procession of Charles XII shows Caroline soldiers carrying the king’s bier across snow-covered mountains after his death at Fredriksten in 1718. He painted it twice: the first version of 1878 is in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the second of 1884 in the Nationalmuseum. The picture shows not a victory but the end of an era, and it became one of the most reproduced in Sweden.

Not all the period’s great names had studied in Düsseldorf. Georg von Rosen trained in Antwerp and in 1871 painted Erik XIV, Karin Månsdotter and Göran Persson, Mårten Eskil Winge studied in Paris and Italy and in 1872 painted Thor’s Fight with the Giants, and August Malmström painted Dancing Fairies in 1866, fairies floating in the mist over a meadow. The term Düsseldorf era is therefore used of all Swedish art of the period, not only of those who were in the city.

The revolt and the aftermath

Towards the end of the 1850s young artists began to seek out Munich and increasingly Paris. For the next generation Düsseldorf became a term of abuse for the smooth, sentimental and over-explicit. The landscape painter Edvard Bergh had studied in Düsseldorf and become a professor at the Academy of Arts, and his son Richard Bergh became one of the leaders of the revolt against the very tradition his father stood for; read more in the guide to The Opponents and the Artists’ Association.

Even so, the pictures of the Düsseldorf era lived on. The Nationalmuseum opened in 1866, and through prints, school wall charts and illustrated newspapers the paintings reached homes all over the country. In recent years art historians have taken a renewed interest in the school, and its best works are of high quality. The whole story is in the app’s period The Düsseldorf era and academicism. Look for the smooth surface, the carefully rendered costumes and the light directed at the picture’s most important figure, as on a theatre stage.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which painting by Gustaf Cederström is among the best known of the Düsseldorf era?