google.com, pub-0288379932320714, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0 GRAVIR LES MONTAGNES... EN PEINTURE: THE GRINDELWALD GLACIER PAINTED BY THOMAS FEARNLEY

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

THE GRINDELWALD GLACIER PAINTED BY THOMAS FEARNLEY

THOMAS FEARNLEY  (1802-1842) The Grindelwald Glacier  (1, 349 m - 4, 425m) Switzerland   In The Grindelwald Glacier, oil on canvas  1838, 194 x 157 cm, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

 
THOMAS FEARNLEY  (1802-1842)
The Grindelwald Glacier  (1, 349 m - 4, 425m)
Switzerland (Bernese Alps)

 In The Grindelwald Glacier, oil on canvas  1838, 194 x 157 cm, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo


About the painting
In The Grindelwaldgletscher, the highlight of Thomas Fearnley’s Swiss landscape paintings, the viewer gazes up from the grassy knoll in the foreground toward the bottom of a valley filled by a glacier. The majestic composition is based on Fearnley’s on-site observations. A sketch in pencil from August 1835 reveals a barren landscape in front of the glacier. The large trees, which form such an essential part of the picture’s overall composition, stem from studies of trees Fearnley made a week later in Scheideck. Fearnley has made the landscape more overpowering than in the original on-site drawing. The mountainsides are steeper and have been accentuated through light and shadow. The contrast to the everlasting ice and snow of the desolate valley is heightened by the lush vegetation in the foreground, where sheep graze under a shepherd’s supervision. Fearnley emphasizes the wild, inaccessible aspects of nature by letting a bird of prey glide above the glacier, even as he playfully includes a visual, English-based pun on his name by adding a tuft of fern next to his signature.
Scholars have noted how the composition and the balancing of the various landscape elements evoke the Düsseldorf painter Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (1807–63), whom Fearnley met during his sojourn in Switzerland. In romanticism, a pronounced contrast between warm and cold tones, as seen here, was also perceived as symbolizing the confrontation between life and death. Before the painting was completed, it was shown at the Paris Salon in 1836. Along with two paintings by J. C. Dahl, this painting and Fearnley’s The Labro Falls at Kongsberg (1837) were the first paintings by Norwegians artists to be acquired by the National Gallery.

The glacier
The Lower Grindelwald Glacier also known as the Lower Grindelwald Glacier is a glacier in the Bernese Alps, located southeast of Grindelwald, in the canton of Bern (Swiss). It originates under the Agassizhorn and the Strahlegghorn and is connected to the Unteraar glacier via the Finsteraarjoch (3,283 m). The Lower Grindelwald Glacier should not be confused with the Upper Grindelwald Glacier, located to the northeast. The Lower Grindelwald Glacier still has a major tributary, the Ischmeer (“sea of ​​ice” in Swiss German, formerly known as the “Grielwald-Fiescher Glacier”, German: Grindelwald-Fieschergletscher3), which is the glacier overlooked by the Eismeer station of the Jungfrau Railway.
The Lower Grindelwald Glacier was 8.3 km long and covered an area of ​​20.8 km2 in 1973. It has shrunk considerably since, being only 6.2 km long in 2015, the 1.9 km retreat being mainly intervened since 2007. In the middle of the 19th century, the glacier reached the valley of Grindelwald as far as Mettenberg, at an altitude of 983 m, near the confluence of the white Lütschine and the black Lütschine. In 1900 it still extended to the Rotenflue (1,200 m) and filled the whole valley from its present end, the glacial lake, with a thickness of about 300 m up to an altitude of 1,700 m, just below the current hiking trail around the Bänisegg. In the early 2000s, it had retreated to the gorge between the Hörnli (Eiger) ridge and the Mättenberg. 

The painter
Thomas Fearnley attended National Cadet Corps from 1814 to 1819. He was a student of the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry (1819–1821), Art Academy in Copenhagen (1821–1823) and the Art Academy (n Stockholm (1823–27) under Carl Johan Fahlcrantz. Fearnley left Copenhagen bound for Stockholm in the autumn of 1823 to complete a painting commissioned by Crown Prince Oscar of Norway and Sweden. He received several orders from the Swedish royal family and from other members of the royal court including Swedish Count Gustaf Trolle-Bonde. He conducted study tours in Norway (1824-1826), at which time he met Johan Christian Dahl in Sogn. After another stay in Copenhagen from 1827 to 1828 and a new Norwegian trip in the autumn of 1828, he went to Germany and was a student of Dahl in Dresden (1829–1830) as well as befriending the German painter Joseph Petzl and the German-Danish painter Friedrich Bernhard Westphal. He lived in Munich (1830–32). Fearnley traveled extensively in the 1830s, visiting Munich, Paris, London, Hull and the English Lake district. During September 1832, he went from Venice to Rome and visited Sicily the following summer. He mostly painted in small towns south of Naples: Castellammare, Amalfi, Sorrento, Capri and in Switzerland: Meiringen, Grindelwald. He went to Paris in the summer of 1835 and visited London the next year. During the summer of 1839 he was on a study tour to the Sognefjord and Hardangerfjord, together with the German painter Andreas Achenbach. Fearnley's paintings alternate between oil sketches and larger, composed landscapes meant for exhibition. His large studio compositions have a cool monumental attitude with a taste for the powerful and wildly romantic in the favorite motifs, wilderness and waterfalls, and with a strong emphasis on the image's architectural structure. The National Gallery in Oslo owns a total of 54 of his smaller pictures and sketches and also a series of drawings. Notable works in this collection include Labrofossen (1837), Grindelwaldgletsjeren (1838) and Slinde Birken (1839). Other notable collections are located in the Bergen Kunstmuseum and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

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2022 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

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