Lot 1316 | Godfred Christensen | Thicket on the Mountainside

CHRISTENSEN, GODFRED
Copenhagen 1845 - 1928

Title: Thicket on the Mountainside.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 34 x 43cm.
Notation: Monogrammed and dated lower right: G.C.70.
Frame: Framed.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

Clouds in particular were the preferred subject of oil study painters in the mid-19th century because they presented painters with special challenges: They moved so quickly in the sky and changed their structure and shape in seconds, so that capturing them demanded not only precision but also great artistic imagination. This collection of oil studies from the period around 1850/1870, gathered over many years, contains numerous special sky studies that also tell of the special approach of the North German, South German and Danish painters to this subject. We see clouds drifting over the North German plains, over low mountain ranges in Saxony, over the Martian field and over the Baltic Sea.

These studies are complemented by numerous studies of nature, painted directly in oils in front of trees and bushes, which are characterised by a great seriousness and grace and the special feeling for nature of the late Romantic period. Here, too, we have examples of French art before us, which cultivate a completely different approach to their surroundings than the cooler Danes or the sensitive Albert Venus and Louis Gurlitt.

Two studies by oil study painters in progress round off the work: once we see a French artist with a parasol in the midst of nature, who is in the process of making a study - and in the second, probably the latest work in the entire collection, we look into the Paris studio of a painter whose furious stroke already heralds the way to modernism