Sublime Nature

Scandinavian Review, Spring 2009 by Ljøgodt, Knut

There are striking similarities between Norwegian and Swiss landscape paintings from the 19th century.

IF WE COMPARE A SWISS ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE painting by, let us say, the great master of the period, Alexandre Calame, with a Norwegian one by Johan Christian Dahl - founding rather of Norwegian art - or one of his pupils, the resemblance is striking. In both eases, we find highly dramatic landscapes - with mountains, valleys, waterfalls and forests. One of Calame's Alpine views can almost be taken for a Norwegian mountain scene, or vice versa. There is a relation between the landscape painting of the two countries that is due to similarities in the natural conditions, to how this nature was regarded and perhaps also to similarities in the historical background.

The Artistic Discovery of Switzerland and Norway

In the 18th century, the wild and inaccessible mountain nature of these two countries was "discovered" as the result of an interest and quest for the sublime in nature. The sublime can be defined as something calling for reverence or even fear through its grandeur. This was classified as an aesthetic category by the English philosopher Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful in 1757. The concept created great interest in the particular beauty of wild nature, and was essential to the developement of romantic landscape painting. Already in the first half of the 18th century, the beauty of the Alps had been praised. Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the Swiss mountains and their dwellings as an ideal landscape. According to Rousseau, mankind had to return to a more natural stage to improve their lives and ethics. The political and moral standards of a country were seen against the background of its geographical conditions. The relatively democratic state of the Swiss regions was regarded as a result of the free and wild mountain nature, and these ideas were developed during the romantic period: In Friedrich von Schiller's William Tell (1804), the Alps are referred to as "the castle of our freedom," a mountainous landscape protecting freeborn men and women against tyrants. The first artist who specialized in Alp landscapes was Caspar Wolf (1735-1783). The publisher Abraham Wagner gave him a commission for almost two hundred paintings of the Swiss mountains, made during the 1770s. Wolfs paintings represent the artistic discovery of the Swiss Alps. They were reproduced as prints, thus being made available to the public. At this stage, the Alps became a theme of great popularity among artists and writers from all over Europe. This, eventually, created a general interest for this sort of nature and became of importance also to the depictions of the Norwegian landscape. The Norwegian landscapes of the Danish painter Erik Pauelsen (1748-1790) from the late 18th century are regarded as the "artistic discovery" of Norway, similar to Wolf's accomplishment in Switzerland. In 1788, Pauelsen traveled through the southern parts of Norway and, once back in Copenhagen, painted several large landscapes of well-known and spectacular sights from Norway based on sketches from his journey. Pauelsen also planned to publish a series of prints with Norwegian prospects - a voyage pittoresque - but executed only one of these before his early death. Several others, however, were published posthumously.

Christen Henriksen Pram (1756-1827), author and political economist, was one of the leading intellectuals of Denmark/Norway. In 1790, he published an essay called "On Norway", originally intended as a preface to Pauelsen's voyage pittoresque. After the artist's death, it was instead printed in a periodical, with a call to subscribe for prints of Pauelsen's landscapes. Pram points out that Pauelsen's intention had been to make Norway and its nature known: "This country deserves to be well-known. It contains many beauties, political and moral, as well as physical." He went on to say that, in general, the inhabitants of mountainous countries always are those who show most loyalty to their birthplace, known as love of one's country. This is so because neither the decline of the old customs, nor the vanities of the world, easily find their ways to these parts."

These ideas we know from Rousseau and others. The people of both countries were, due to the beauty of nature and the isolated life in the mountainous landscapes, of a higher character and more protected from the aristocratic feudal system than the rest of Europe. Pram was himself Norwegian by birth and belonged to the circles of "Norske Selskab" (the Norwegian Society) in Copenhagen. The obvious agenda of his article was to strengthen the political position of Norway, which was then a part of the Danish Kingdom. Norway, like Switzerland, is pointed out as an ideal; not only regarding nature but also regarding politics and morality. Thus, the writer uses the Norwegian landscapes of Pauelsen and the comparison with Switzerland as an argument in a contemporary political discourse.