LES ILES LOFOTEN PEINTES PAR ANNA-KATARINA BOBERG

 

ANNA-KATARINA BOBERG (1864-1935)
Le Higravstinden / Iles Lofoten (1,148 m- 3766 ft)
Norvège

In " Northern Lights. Study from North Norway" (c. 1901-09) huile sur toile 46 x 55 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 

 

La montagne
Le Higravstinden (1, 148 m- 3,766 ft) )est le plus haut sommet de l'archipel des Lofoten appartenant à la Norvège. Il se situe sur l'île d'Austvågøya. Les îles Lofoten se situent au large de Bodø, au nord du cercle polaire, entre la mer de Norvège et le Vestfjord, bras de mer poissonneux qui les sépare du continent. Les Lofoten sont caractérisées par des montagnes et des pics, des baies protégées et des côtes découpées. Si le nord de l'archipel fournit des étendues herbeuses relativement importantes, le relief est de plus en plus escarpé au fur et à mesure que l'on descend vers le sud, laissant place à une forme caractéristique d'« Alpes dans la mer », où seule une étroite bande côtière est assez habitable. À Svolvær, le jour polaire se produit du 25 mai au 17 juillet, et la nuit polaire du 4 décembre au 7 janvier. À Leknes, le soleil ne descend pas sous l'horizon entre le 26 mai et le 17 juillet. La nuit est ininterrompue du 9 décembre au 4 janvier. Des aerores boréales et des phénomènes lumineux inhabituels sous d'autres latitude terrestres peuvent alors être observés, comme c'est le cas sur cette toile de Anna Katarina BIoberg


L'artiste
Anna Katarina Boberg (1864-1935), suédoise, mariée à l'architecte Ferdinand Boberg est née Anna Scholander, fille de l'architecte Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander. Elle est la sixième de sept enfants. Elle étudie le français et, durant une courte période, étudie la peinture à l'Académie Julian à Paris. En 1905, Anna Boberg rencontre Margaret de Connaught, princesse héritière de Suède, qui était aussi peintre. Un rencontre et amitié qui mènera les deux femmes chevalier en bandouliere dans dans la région de Stockholm ou elles peignirent ensemble de nombreux paysages. Mais le grand œuvre d'Anna Boberg fut le sans conteste sa peinture des paysages des Iles Lofoten qu'elle découvrit pour la première fois en 1901 et et qu'elle ne cessa de peindre pendant les 33 années suivantes. Les glaciers, l'océan, le soleil de minuit et ses lumières furent d'inépuisables sources d'inspiration pour elle. En 1925, elle s'installe avec son mari à Paris où ils resteront quatre années avant de retourner à Stockholm. Ils vvrrons désormais dans la villa Tin Grand à Södermalm jusqu’à la mort d'Anna Boberg en 1935. Anna Boberg fut une artiste polyvalente. Elle peignit aussi bien des tableaux de montagnes que des panneaux décoratifs,pour les salles à manger des grands hôtels. Elle a également conçu la céramique « Vase Peacock » pour Rörstrand en 1897. Elle a aussi travaillé le verre et le tissu avec un égal bonheur. 

 

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2023 - Wandering Vertexes ....
            Errant au-dessus des Sommets Silencieux...
            Un blog de Francis Rousseau

 

THE GRINDELWALD GLACIER PAINTED BY THOMAS FEARNLEY

 

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

MONTE CIVETTA PAINTED BY ELIJAH WALTON

 

ELIJAH WALTON (1832-1880)
Monte Civetta (3,220 m - 10, 580 ft)
Italy

In Dolomites - in Spring. Civetta from Forcella Staulanza (North East), 1875 oil on canvas, 38 x 183 cm.

The mountain
Monte Civetta (3,220 m - 10, 580 ft) is a prominent and major mountain of the Dolomites, in the Province of Belluno in northern Italy. Its north-west face can be viewed from the Taibon Agordino valley, and is classed as one of the symbols of the Dolomites. The mountain is thought to have been first climbed by Simeone di Silvestro in 1855, which, if true, makes it the first major Dolomite peak to be climbed. The north-western face, with its 1,000-metre-high cliff, was first climbed in 1925 by Emil Solleder and Gustl Lettenbauer. It is historically considered the first "sixth grade" in six-tier scale of alpinistic difficulties proposed by Willo Welzenbach (corresponding to 5.9). Thirty years later UIAA used this as a basis for its grading system. The famed Svan mountain climber Mikhail Khergiani died in a climbing accident on Monte Civetta in 1969.

The artist
The British landscapist, Elijah Walton is best known for his landscapes of mountains in the Alps. Due to the poorness of his family, without the help of one or two friends he would have been unable to study art, for which his talent was soon exhibited. After passing some years at the art academy in Birmingham, he became at the age of eighteen a student at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he had already exhibited a picture. There he worked assiduously, drawing from the antique and from life. Nearly ten years later an accidental circumstance revealed to a friend his capabilities in mountain landscape, and in 1860, immediately after his marriage, he went to Switzerland. Thence he proceeded to Egypt, where unhappily his wife died of dysentery near the second cataract. He remained in the east, spending some time in Syria and at Constantinople, till the spring of 1862, when he returned for a short time to London. But for the next five years he was much abroad, working either in the Alps or in Egypt. His sketching tours then became rarer and shorter, though he visited Greece, Norway, and the Alps. At first he resided at Staines, then removed to the neighbourhood of Bromsgrove, living most of the time at the Forelands, near that town. In 1872 his wife died, and the loss permanently affected his health. He died on 25 August 1880 at his residence Beacon Farm, Lickey near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, leaving three sons. Walton's life was bound up in his art. He worked both in oils and in watercolours, but was more successful with the latter. Most thorough and conscientious in the study both of form and of colour, he delighted especially in mountain scenery and in atmospheric effects, such as an Alpine peak breaking through the mists, or a sunset on the Nile. Few men have equalled him in the truthful rendering of rock structure and mountain form. His pictures were much appreciated by lovers of nature; but as those of small size sold better than larger and more highly finished works, this fostered a tendency to mannerisms.

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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

MOUNT MARCY PAINTED BY JONAS LIE

 

JONAS LIE (1880-1940)
Mount Marcy (1,629m - 5,343ft)
United States of America (Essex County)

In Snow - Adirondacks, Private collection (Christie's)

The mountain
Mount Marcy (1,629m - 5,343ft) in Mohawk langage Tewawe’estha is the highest point in New York State. It is located in the Town of Keene in Essex County. The mountain is in the heart of the Adirondack High Peaks Region of the High Peaks Wilderness Area. Its stature and expansive views make it a popular destination for hikers, who crowd its summit in the summer months.
Lake Tear of the Clouds, at the col between Mt. Marcy and Mt. Skylight, is often cited as the highest source of the Hudson River, via Feldspar Brook and the Opalescent River, even though the main stem of the Opalescent River has as its source a higher point two miles north of Lake of the Clouds, and that stem is a mile longer than Feldspar Brook.
The mountain is named after Gov. William L. Marcy, the 19th-century Governor of New York, who authorized the environmental survey that explored the area. Its first recorded ascent was on August 5, 1837, by a large party led by Ebenezer Emmons looking for the source of the East Fork of the Hudson River.  Today the summit may be reached by multiple trails; though long by any route, a round-trip may be made in a day.

The painter
Jonas Lie was a Norwegian-born American painter. He is best known for colorful paintings of coastlines of New England and city scenes of New York City.
Between 1901 and the memorial exhibition in 1940 his work was shown all over America. In 1905 Lie exhibited 34 pictures in the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Museum of Art. Between 1905 and 1938 Lie had 57 one-man shows, each including from 12 to 45 paintings. He participated in important annual and biennial exhibitions at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington as well as most of the world fairs. While living in Panama in 1913, he painted scenes of the construction of Panama Canal which were later donated to U.S. Military Academy at West Point in memory of the West Pointer who, as chief engineer, was most potent in channeling the isthmus, General George W. Goethals. In 1932, Jonas Lie was awarded the Knight of Order of St. Olav by the King of Norway.
Jonas Lie often depicted the sea, channels, and ships with dramatic perspective and powerful use of color. He became known for colorful impressionistic scenes of harbors & coves, painted during the many summers he spent on the coasts of New England & Canada. Throughout his prolific career he painted brilliantly colored images of the rocky coves and harbors that identify the region's dramatic shoreline.

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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

TROLLSLOTTET MOUNTAIN PAINTED BY VEJBJØRN SAND

VEJBJØRN SAND (bn. 1966)
Trollslottet mountain (2,737 m- 8,930 ft)
Antarctica

In Trollslottet, 1997, Antarctica  

 

About this Painting
After an expedition to Antarctica, Queen Maud Land (Independent Norwegian territory in Antarctica) , Vebjørn completed his first public work, The Troll Castle (Trollslottet) which was inspired by the voyage. In collaboration with the team who arranged the opening of the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer in 1994, Vebjørn constructed a “Mini Antarctica” formed by 10 towers surrounding a circle, all reminiscent of Arnesteinen, a mountain shooting out of the ice in the shape of a cathedral. Inside the castle Vebjørn included paintings (as the one above) conceived and executed in Antarctica, stored inside glass boxes to resemble ice. The castle was designed so that visitors could walk inside the space and experience a frigid atmosphere similar to the one Vebjørn did when he painted them. During the first 3 months of its opening in the winter of 1997/98, 180,000 people visited the Troll Castle.

The mountain
Trollslottet Mountain (2,737m - 8,930ft) situated at 71°56′S 7°14′E, is a high ridgelike mountain with several prominent peaks  forming the northwest limit of the Filchner Mountains in Queen Maud Land (Independant Norwegian territory in Antarctica). Plotted from surveys and air photos by Norwegian Antarctic Expedition (1956–60) and named Trollslottet (the troll castle). The Filchner Mountains are a group of mountains 11 km (7 mi) southwest of the Drygalski Mountains, at the western end of the Orvin Mountains of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica. They were discovered by the Third German Antarctic Expedition (1938–1939), led by Capt. Alfred Ritscher, and named for Wilhelm Filchner, leader of the German expedition to the Weddell Sea area in 1911–12. They were remapped from air photos taken by the Sixth Norwegian Antarctic Expedition, 1958–59

The Painter
Vebjørn Sand (born March 11, 1966) is a Norwegian painter and artist. He is known for his paintings as well as his public arts projects, such as the Da Vinci Project, and the Kepler Star monument (Norwegian Peace Star) at Oslo Airport, Gardermoen.
Building off the original Da Vinci bridge in Norway, Vebjørn used Leonardo's philosophy of encompassing all fields of research to use the project to discuss global warming. First he used ice to reinterpret and construct a new bridge during his expedition to Queen Maud Land in Antarctica. After that, in December of 2007, Vebjørn erected a temporary ice bridge to dramatize the melting glaciers of Antarctica due to climate change outside of the United Nations Plaza in New York. During the unveiling at the U.N. Headquarters, Vebjørn said of the bridge in Antarctica,
“Our future lays underneath that ice glacier. So to erect it on that glacier, and that part of Antarctica, (it) must never melt. The one outside the United Nations is intended to melt to show that Antarctica is melting.”
The bridge was unveiled earlier that year two days after nearly 200 nations agreed at the U.N.-led talks in Bali to launch negotiations on a new pact to fight global warming.
In 2009, Vebjørn built another ice bridge in Ilulissat, Greenland (where most icebergs are borne into the sea). Later that year in Copenhagen, as part of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP15, Vebjørn constructed yet another ice bridge in front of the Danish Parliament to raise global awareness of climate change.


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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...

by Francis Rousseau 


MOUNT KOLSASS PAINTED BY CLAUDE MONET

 

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Kolsås or Kolsass mountain (342 m - 1,122 ft)
Norway

In "Le village de Sandviken, près du Mount Kolsaas" Norvège, 1895, Huile sur toile 73,4 x92, 5 cm - Art Institute Chicago

Monet and Mount Kolsass
A text in french from the book Claude Monet, une vie dans le paysage by Marianne Alphant - Editions Hazan, 1993. (You may use the Google translation tool in this blog to tranlaste into your own langage)
« Au cours l'hiver 1895 le peintre français fit un séjour en Norvège. et peignit a plusieurs reprises à différentes heures du jour et dans différentes conditions climatiques une montagne, le mont Kolsaas. Mais sitôt réalisées leur auteur n'en fut guère satisfait et elles furent vite éclipsées par l'exposition des Cathédrales. Des vingt-sept ou vingt-huit qui furent recensées, le musée Rodin n'en propose qu'une douzaine, issues de collections publiques (Orsay, Marmottan) aussi bien que privées (Japon, Etats-Unis) et déjà présentées à Stavanger, en Norvège.
Monet effectua ce long voyage vers le Nord sur l'invitation de son beau-fils Jacques Hoschedé, pour saisir quelques effets de neige qu'il escomptait bien capter facilement là-bas. En quoi il se trompait généreusement, erreur à l'origine d'un de ses plus intéressants ratages.
Les quatre «portraits» du mont Kolsaas sont assez intrigants en ce que l’on y perçoit tout l'art du peintre pour «rendre» l'impalpable bien que cela l'entraînent vers des contrées inexplorées. « Le motif se met à flotter dans une atmosphère qui ne le porte plus, ne le soutient plus, l'abandonnant au gré d'une humeur vagabonde, à la manière d'un nuage libre de dériver au gré des vents. L'impression d'échec provient alors d'une incapacité à arrimer la figure, à saisir l'objet à bras le corps, à se tenir d'aplomb face à ce qui le surplombe. Mais la valeur inestimable de cet apparent échec excède largement cet effet de brouillon. (…)
Les peintures ne doivent pas leur sentiment d'incomplétude à une quelconque précipitation mais bien plutôt au désir de se fondre dans un immense éloge à la blancheur. (…)
Le mont Kolsaas ressemble de la sorte au dernier souffle ou à l'éternuement d'un linceul qui, l'instant suivant, s'affaissera dans l'indéterminé d'une forme sans contour. Autrement dit, l'informe. Ces quelques peintures représentent sans doute l'une des rares tentatives de distinguer la neige de la blancheur, de séparer les deux corps comme on le ferait dans une expérience chimique de dissociation. Car la neige n'est pas blanche, pas plus que le blanc n'est la couleur de la neige. L'un et l'autre entrent doucement en conflit pour que, dans l'intervalle, à la faveur d'une anecdote ­ petit pont ou rivière ­, se glisse l'élément qui permettra de rassurer la vision. Entre la neige et la blancheur, il y a un mariage fatal qu'il faut à tout prix éviter faute de s'y endormir. Entre le ciel et le bleu, c'est pareil mais c'est une autre histoire. Les deux histoires se rejouent chaque fois qu'un peintre essaie de fixer leur frontière, leur bord extrême. Comment cette peinture pourrait-elle alors s'achever ?."

The mountain
Kolsås or Kolsass Mountain (342 m - 1,122 ft) is a wooded mountain ridge in the municipality of Bærum, Norway. Geologically, Kolsås belongs to the Oslo Graben area. Its two peaks (one at 387m the other at 342m) consist of hard rhomb porphyric lava covering softer rocks, forming steep cliffs to the east, south and west. An old farm beneath the mountain has the name Kolsberg. The first element in this name is the genitive case of the old male name Kolr, and the last element is "berg" (mountain). The parish and municipality of Bærum (Old Norse Bergheimr) is probably named after this prominent mountain. The last element in the name of the mountain was later changed to ås (mountain ridge) to distinguish it from the name of the farm.
The French painter Claude Monet painted Mont Kolsaas in 1895 in a series of 4 paintings  one is permanently shown at the Musée d’Orsay , an other in Musée Marmottan. in Paris The 2 others shows on this blog are held in private collections in USA and Japan.

The painter
The painter Oscar-Claude Monet better known as Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting « Impression, soleil levant » (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.
Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons exactly like the japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849) did with his 36 views of Mount Fuji.
  Monet repeated this kinf of "exercise de stylee with his series on Les Petites Dalles.

 
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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

NEWTONTOPPEN ( SPITZBERGEN) BY CHARLES HAMILTON SMITH

CHARLES HAMILTON SMITH (1776-1859)
Newtontoppen (1,713 m - 5,620ft)
Norway (Svalbard- Spitzbergen)

In Spitzbergen, Bearing South,  watercolor and graphite from Views of Polar region, Yale Center for British arts, USA

The mountain
Newtontoppen  (1,713 m - 5,620ft) or Newton Peak, named in 1898 after Isaac Newton, is the largest and highest mountain in Svalbard. Its peak is the highest point on Svalbard.  It is located at the north east corner on the island of Spitsbergen in the Chydeniusfjella range.  The nearest settlement is the formerly Soviet coal mining settlement, Pyramiden. The mountain is mostly made of Silurian granite. The mountain was first ascended by Helge Backlund on 4 August 1900.  Spitsbergen, (sharp mountains) is an island belonging to Norway and located in Svalbard, an archipelago forming a territory of this country. The island bears the name of Spitsbergen since1920, date of the signing of the treaty which regulates in particular fishing rights (whaling among others). The treaty signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden, leads all the contracting states to recognize the sovereignty of Norway over this territory.  France has two scientific research stations at Spitzbergen: the Charles Rabot base and the Jean Corbel base, the latter (created in 1964) being the oldest of the archipelago's scientific stations.
Spitsbergen was discovered by chance by Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz in 1596 while en route to China via the Northeast Passage. He then named the island Spitsbergen in reference to the craggy peaks he saw.  Nevertheless, the archipelago seems to have been known by Russian Pomor hunters as early as the 12th and 14th centuries. Tourism is nowadays  one of Spitsbergen's main sources of income with cruise ships, including those of the Hurtigruten company. The island is also served by the airports of Longyearbyen and Ny-Ålesund.

The artist
Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith, was an English artist, naturalist, antiquary, illustrator, soldier, and... spy as well !. His military career began in 1787, when he studied at the Austrian academy for artillery and engineers at Mechelen and Leuven in Belgium (his native country). Although his military service, which ended in 1820 and included the Napoleonic Wars, saw him travel extensively (including the West Indies, Canada, United States, Southern and Northern Europe and ...Antarctica).
As a prolific self-taught illustrator (over 38,000 drawings!) He left quite an important number of books of beautifully watercolored landscapes taken all around the world. those nooks of watercolors are nowadays in the collections of the Yale Center From British Art. Among them :
- Views of France, Volume I (81 watercolors), Views of France, Volume II (93 watercolors),
- Views of England and Wales, Volume I (82 watercolors), Views of England and Wales, Volume II (74 watercolors),
- Views of Northern Europe, Volume I (68 watercolors), Views of Northern Europe, Volume II (78) watercolors),
- Views of Polar Regions (75 watercolors) (see above)
- Views of Spain, Volume I (69 watercolors), Views of Spain, Volume II (72 watercolors), But one of his noteworthy achievements was an 1800 experiment to determine which color should be used for military uniforms. He is also known in military history circles for Costume of the Army of the British Empire, produced towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars and an accurate depiction of contemporary British uniform.
As an antiquarian, he also produced, in collaboration with Samuel Rush Meyrick, Costume of the Original Inhabitants of the British Islands, 1815, and The Ancient Costume of England, with historical illustrations of medieval knights, ladies, shipsm and battles.
He also wrote on the history of the Seven Years' War and The Natural history of dogs.
Quite a productive fellow !

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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

TOFANE PAINTED BY ELIJAH WALTON

 

ELIJAH WALTON (1832-1880)
Tofane (3,244 m  - 10,643 ft) 
Italy 

In Tofane as seen from near Cortina d'Ampezzo, Tyrol. 1866 , Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

 

The mountain

 Tofane is a mountain group in the Dolomites of northern Italy, west of Cortina d'Ampezzo in the province of Belluno, Veneto. Most of the Tofane lies within Parco naturale delle Dolomiti d'Ampezzo, a nature park. The highest peaks of the Tofane group are Tofana di Mezzo (3,244 m -10,643 ft), Tofana di Dentro (3,238 m-10,623 ft), and Tofana di Rozes (3,225 m -10,581 ft). Tofana di Mezzo is the third highest peak in the Dolomites, after Marmolada (3,343 m -10,968 ft)) and Antelao (3,262 m -10,702 ft). All three peaks were first climbed by Paul Grohmann along with local mountain guides, in 1863 (Tofana di Mezzo - with Francesco Lacedelli), 1864 (Tofana di Rozes - with Francesco Lacedelli, Angelo Dimai and Santo Siorpaes) and 1865 (Tofana di Dentro - with Angelo Dimai).During the First World War, the Tofane was a battlefield of the Italian Front for clashes between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces. The front lines went through the mountains.At the 1956 Winter Olympics, Mount Tofane hosted five of the six alpine skiing events. It regularly hosts women's speed events on the World Cup circuit, and is scheduled to host the World Championships in 2021. The route is famous for the Tofana Schuss, where the athletes can reach 130 kilometers per hour.


The artist
The British landscapist, Elijah Walton is best known for his landscapes of mountains in the Alps.
Due to the poorness of his family, without the help of one or two friends he would have been unable to study art, for which his talent was soon exhibited. After passing some years at the art academy in Birmingham, he became at the age of eighteen a student at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he had already exhibited a picture. There he worked assiduously, drawing from the antique and from life. Nearly ten years later an accidental circumstance revealed to a friend his capabilities in mountain landscape, and in 1860, immediately after his marriage, he went to Switzerland. Thence he proceeded to Egypt, where unhappily his wife died of dysentery near the second cataract. He remained in the east, spending some time in Syria and at Constantinople, till the spring of 1862, when he returned for a short time to London. But for the next five years he was much abroad, working either in the Alps or in Egypt. His sketching tours then became rarer and shorter, though he visited Greece, Norway, and the Alps. At first he resided at Staines, then removed to the neighbourhood of Bromsgrove, living most of the time at the Forelands, near that town. In 1872 his wife died, and the loss permanently affected his health. He died on 25 August 1880 at his residence Beacon Farm, Lickey near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, leaving three sons. Walton's life was bound up in his art. He worked both in oils and in watercolours, but was more successful with the latter. Most thorough and conscientious in the study both of form and of colour, he delighted especially in mountain scenery and in atmospheric effects, such as an Alpine peak breaking through the mists, or a sunset on the Nile. Few men have equalled him in the truthful rendering of rock structure and mountain form. His pictures were much appreciated by lovers of nature; but as those of small size sold better than larger and more highly finished works, this fostered a tendency to mannerisms.

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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

MØNS KLINT & SOMMERSPIET BY FREDERIK SØDRING

 

   FREDERIK SØDRING  (1809–1862)

Sommerspiret  (120 m-393 ft)

Denmark

In Part of Mons Klint with the Sommerspiret, 1830,  Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum

The cliff
Sommerspiret (120 m - 393 ft) is one of the chalk cliffs forming Møns Klint, a 6 km stretch of cliffs along the eastern coast of the Danish island of Møn in the Baltic Sea. Some of the cliffs fall a sheer 120 m to the sea below. The highest cliff is Dronningestolen (128 m- 420 ft). The area around Møns Klint consists of woodlands, pastures, ponds and steep hills, including Aborrebjerg which, with a height of 143 m - 469ft), is one of the highest points in Denmark. The cliffs and adjacent park are now protected as a nature reserve. Møns Klint receives around 250,000 visitors a year. There are clearly marked paths for walkers, riders and cyclists. The path along the cliff tops leads to steps down to the shore in several locations.
On 29 May 2007, close to the cliff tops, the GeoCenter Møns Klint was opened by Queen Margrethe. The geological museum with interactive computer displays and a variety of attractions for children traces the geological prehistory of Denmark and the formation of the chalk cliffs. The museum was designed by PLH Architects, the winners of an international design competition.
Møns Klint has been a most popular subject for landscape painters, especially during the Danish Golden Age when the national romanticism movement encouraged artists to take renewed interest in the Danish countryside.

The painter
Sødring was born in Aalborg, Denmark. He spent some time living in Norway with his parents before studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen beginning in 1825. There he initially studied under Jens Peter Møller, but his greatest influence was from the romantic art of Johan Christian Dahl. Between 1829 and 1831 Sødring travelled to Norway and Germany, taking time to study in Munich. He traveled to Norway and Southern Sweden between 1832-36 and returned during 1847. He was awarded the Fund ad Usus Publicos 1836-38. He travelled to Germany (mainly Munich) 1836-38) and to Paris in 1843.He continued to work, sending several paintings back to Denmark. These travels influenced Sødring's later works. Upon his return, he continued to paint, exhibiting landscapes from the Rhine, Southern Germany, and Tyrol. In 1832, he was painted by Christen Købke; the portrait is now part of the Hirschsprung Collection.[
He exhibited at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition 1828-36, 1838-40, 1842-47, 1858. Sødring's other exhibition included at the Salon in Paris and University of Copenhagen both in 1843.

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2020 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

MOUNT BAKER / KULSHAN PAINTED BY JONAS LIE

 

JONAS LIE  (1880-1940)

Mount Baker / Kulshan ((3,286 m - 10,781 ft

United States of America

In Mount Baker, 1925, oil on canvas, Courtesy Saranac Lake Free Library

The mountain
Mount Baker ((3,286 m - 10,781 ft), also known as Koma Kulshan or simply Kulshan, is a active glaciated andesitic stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc and the North Cascades of Washington in the United States. Mount Baker has the second-most thermally active crater in the Cascade Range after Mount Saint Helens. About 30 miles (48 km)[due east of the city of Bellingham, Whatcom County, Mount Baker is the youngest volcano in the Mount Baker volcanic field. While volcanism has persisted here for some 1.5 million years, the current glaciated cone is likely no more than 140,000 years old, and possibly no older than 80–90,000 years. Older volcanic edifices have mostly eroded away due to glaciation.
After Mount Rainier, Mount Baker is the most heavily glaciated of the Cascade Range volcanoes; the volume of snow and ice on Mount Baker, 0.43 cu mi (1.79 km3) is greater than that of all the other Cascades volcanoes (except Rainier) combined. It is also one of the snowiest places in the world; in 1999, Mount Baker Ski Area, located 9 mi (14.5 km) to the northeast, set the world record for recorded snowfall in a single season—1,140 in (29 m; 95 ft).
Mt. Baker is the third-highest mountain in Washington and the fifth-highest in the Cascade Range, if Little Tahoma Peak, a subpeak of Mount Rainier, and Shastina, a subpeak of Mount Shasta, are not counted.[Located in the Mount Baker Wilderness, it is visible from much of Greater Victoria, Nanaimo, and Greater Vancouver in British Columbia, and to the south, from Seattle (and on clear days Tacoma) in Washington.
Indigenous peoples have known the mountain for thousands of years, but the first written record of the mountain is from Spanish explorer Gonzalo Lopez de Haro, who mapped it in 1790 as Gran Montaña del Carmelo, "Great Mount Carmel". The explorer George Vancouver renamed the mountain for 3rd Lieutenant Joseph Baker of HMS Discovery, who saw it on April 30, 1792.

The painter
Jonas Lie was a Norwegian-born American painter. He is best known for colorful paintings of coastlines of New England and city scenes of New York City.
Between 1901 and the memorial exhibition in 1940 his work was shown all over America. In 1905 Lie exhibited 34 pictures in the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Museum of Art. Between 1905 and 1938 Lie had 57 one-man shows, each including from 12 to 45 paintings. He participated in important annual and biennial exhibitions at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington as well as most of the world fairs. While living in Panama in 1913, he painted scenes of the construction of Panama Canal which were later donated to U.S. Military Academy at West Point in memory of the West Pointer who, as chief engineer, was most potent in channeling the isthmus, General George W. Goethals. In 1932, Jonas Lie was awarded the Knight of Order of St. Olav by the King of Norway.
Jonas Lie often depicted the sea, channels, and ships with dramatic perspective and powerful use of color. He became known for colorful impressionistic scenes of harbors & coves, painted during the many summers he spent on the coasts of New England & Canada. Throughout his prolific career he painted brilliantly colored images of the rocky coves and harbors that identify the region's dramatic shoreline.

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2020 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

SOMMERSPIRETAND MØNS KLINT PAINTED BY GEORG EMIL LIBERT

GEORG EMIL LIBERT (1820-1908)  

Sommerspiret  (120 m - 393 ft)

Denmark

In View of Sommerspiret, the Cliffs of Møn, 1846, oil on canvas, mounted on board, 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund

About the painting
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Denmark experienced an artistic “Golden Age”. Following the Napoleonic Wars, the small, peninsular kingdom suffered English naval aggression, the dissolution of its partnership with Norway, and increasing hostility with Germany. As modern Denmark emerged as a constitutional monarchy, artists sought a unifying and stabilizing identity for the nation. Inspired by German romantic nationalism, best represented by the mesmerizing meditations on landscape of Caspar David Friedrich, Danish artists produced meticulous images in crystalline light of their native countryside. In the colors and contours of the Danish landscape, they sought to define a distinctly national spirit.
Here, he pictures the white chalk cliffs of the island of Møn in the Baltic Sea, not far from the island of Rügen where Friedrich painted several celebrated images of chalk cliffs. Much of Demark exists on a plateau of white chalk. In places, the bleach-white earth erupts into the sun, washed by the sea. The tourist destination gained additional appeal from the Sommerspiret, or summer spire, a towering chalk formation gleaming against the bright blue Danish sky. Several Danish Golden Age painters, including Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and Louis Gurlitt, painted the Sommerspiret. (Alas, in 1988 it naturally eroded into the sea.) The high degree of finish, clear, harmonious tones, and the inclusion of small figures beholding the marvelous scene are classic characteristics of this moment in the history of landscape painting.

The painter  

Georg Emil Libert was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the son of Johan Christian Libert (1790-1846) and his first wife, Andrea Margrethe Hassing (1796-1820). His father was a cabinetmaker.
He was a graduate of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen where he studied under Johan Ludwig Lund (1777– 1867). In 1845, he applied for travel support from the Academy, which was awarded to him in 1846 with renewed scholarship in 1847. He stayed abroad from 1857-59, especially in Germany and Switzerland. He sought inspiration, especially from the Munich landscape scene.
He exhibited many works in Charlottenborg and at the Kunstforeningen (Art Association). He is best known for his paintings of the Baltic island of Bornholm; indeed one of the cliffs at Helligdomsklipperne, Libert's Rock (Libertsklippen) is named after him.
Many of his works today are in the Danish National Gallery and Thorvaldsens Museum, and are highly sought after by buyers; his painting Ansicht des Heidelberger Schlosses Zwischen der Molkenkur, der Stadt (1859) sold for $11,240 at Sotheby's in Munich in June 1994.

The cliff

Sommerspiret  (120 m - 393 ft) is one of the chalk cliffs  forming Møns Klint, a 6 km stretch of cliffs along the eastern coast of the Danish island of Møn in the Baltic Sea. Some of the cliffs fall a sheer 120 m to the sea below. The highest cliff is Dronningestolen  (128 m- 420 ft).  The area around Møns Klint consists of woodlands, pastures, ponds and steep hills, including Aborrebjerg which, with a height of 143 m - 469ft), is one of the highest points in Denmark. The cliffs and adjacent park are now protected as a nature reserve. Møns Klint receives around 250,000 visitors a year. There are clearly marked paths for walkers, riders and cyclists. The path along the cliff tops leads to steps down to the shore in several locations.
On 29 May 2007, close to the cliff tops, the GeoCenter Møns Klint was opened by Queen Margrethe. The geological museum with interactive computer displays and a variety of attractions for children traces the geological prehistory of Denmark and the formation of the chalk cliffs. The museum was designed by PLH Architects, the winners of an international design competition.

Møns Klint has been a most popular subject for landscape painters, especially during the Danish Golden Age when the national romanticism movement encouraged artists to take renewed interest in the Danish countryside.

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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

THE WATZMANN BY JOHAN CHRISTIAN DAHL

JOHAN CHRISTIAN DAHL  (1788-1857) 

The Watzmann (2, 713m - 8, 901ft) 

Germany 

In Der Watzmann, 1825, oil on canvas, 45 x 33 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet,  Oslo

The mountain 
The Watzmann (2,713m - 8,901ft) is a mountain in the Bavarian Alps south of the village of Berchtesgaden. It is the third highest in Germany, and the highest located entirely on German territory. Three main peaks array on a N-S axis along a ridge on the mountain's taller western half: Hocheck (2,651 m), Mittelspitze (Middle Peak, 2,713 m) and Sьdspitze (South Peak, 2,712 m).
The Watzmann massif also includes the 2,307 m Watzmannfrau (Watzmann Wife, also known as Kleiner Watzmann or Small Watzmann), and the Watzmannkinder (Watzmann Children), five lower peaks in the recess between the main peaks and the Watzmannfrau.
The entire massif lies inside Berchtesgaden National Park.
The Watzmann Glacier is located below the famous east face of the Watzmann in the Watzmann cirque and is surrounded by the Watzmanngrat arête, the Watzmannkindern and the Kleiner Watzmann. The size of the glacier reduced from around 30 hectares (74 acres) in 1820 until it split into a few fields of firn, but between 1965 and 1980 it advanced significantly again and now has an area of 10.1 hectares (25 acres). Above and to the west of the icefield lie the remains of a transport-bomber that crashed in October 1940...
Full entry  =>

The painter
Johan Christian Claussen Dahl, often known as J. C. Dahl or I. C. Dahl, was a Norwegian artist who is considered the first great romantic painter in Norway, the founder of the "golden age" of Norwegian painting, and, by some, one of the greatest European artists.  He is often described as "the father of Norwegian landscape painting". He was the first to acquire genuine fame and cultural renown abroad. As one critic has put it, "J.C. Dahl occupies a central position in Norwegian artistic life of the first half of the 19th century.
Although Dahl spent much of his life outside of Norway, his love for his country is clear in the motifs he chose for his paintings and in his extraordinary efforts on behalf of Norwegian culture generally. Indeed, if one sets aside his own monumental artistic creations, his other activities on behalf of art, history, and culture would still have guaranteed him a place at the very heart of the artistic and cultural history of Norway. He was, for example, a key figure in the founding of the Norwegian National Gallery and of several other major art institutions in Norway, as well as in the preservation of Norwegian stave churches and the restoration of the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim and Håkonshallen in Bergen
Many of his works may be seen in Dresden, and in The Bergen Kunstmuseum in Bergen, as well as in  The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design  The National Gallery in  Oslo  which has a large collection of Dahl's.

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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...

by Francis Rousseau 

TROLLTINDENE PAINTED BY PEDER BLAKE

PEDER BALKE (1804-1887)

Trolltindene  or Seven Sisters (1,072 m - 3,517 ft)

Norway 

In Mountain Range Trolltindene, oil on canvas, 30.8 x 41.9 cm, c. 1840, 

Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø, Norway

About the painting
One of Peder Balke's earliest surviving paintings of the coast is the romantic and dramatic Mountain Range Trolltindene  (or Seven Sisters) from about 1840. Its carefully framed clear patch in the clouds reveals this part of a mountain chain rising to over 1000 m, at the western edge of the great Rondane National Park in central Norway.

The mountains 
Trolltindene  or Seven Sisters (1,072 m - 3,517 ft)  is a mountain range on the island of Alsten in Alstahaug Municipality in Nordlandcounty, Norway.The mountain range consists of seven peaks on the southeastern half of the island. whicg are (listed from northeast to southwest):

- Botnkrona (1,072 m - 3,517 ft)
- Grytfoten (1,019 m - 3,343 ft)
- Skjæringen (1,037 - 3,402 ft)
- Tvillingene (980 m- 3,220 ft)
- Breitinden  (910m - 2,990 ft)
The range is popular with hikers and offers scenic views over the surrounding area. On clear days visitors can truly understand why the surroundings are called "The kingdom of the thousand isles" by the locals.

The painter 
Peder Balke is a Norwegian painter that was even barely known in his home country, until recently. He didn’t encounter success during his lifetime. Having difficulties to sell his paintings, he abandoned his career to focus on social projects and politics but he continued to paint for his own pleasure. Once delivered from the pressure of making a living from his paintings, his style changed to become more personal, more modern.
During the summer 1832, Peder Balke, who was in love with the Norwegian landscapes, decided to go and seek for its most remote, its most desolate and its most distant points by sailing up the west coast of Norway as far as he could go. He went up to the inhospitable and barely accessible far-northern region of Finnmark. He reached the North Cape, the northernmost part of Norway, which was even more impressive at that time because it was the further north you could go, the final limit to knowledge and exploration – beyond it lies nothing (explorers only reached the North Pole in the late 1900s, two decades after his death).

Peder Balke wrote in his memoirs: “I can’t begin to describe how elated I was at having seen and re-tread the land, once again, after satisfying my deep longing to see the northern provinces. No easier is it for me to pen my thoughts on which sublime and mesmerizing impressions the wealth of natural beauty and unrivaled settings leave upon the mind of an observer. These impressions not only overwhelmed me for a brief moment, but they, too, influenced my entire future since I never yet, neither abroad nor other places in our country, have had the occasion to gaze at something so awe-inspiring and exciting as that which I observed during this journey to Finnmark. Unsurpassed in the norther provinces is the beauty of nature, while humans – nature’s children – play but a minor role, in comparison”.

The 1832 journey had a momentous effect upon his development as an artist; the eerie, isolated, dramatic and gloomy Arctic landscapes became a leitmotiv as he continued to paint them from his memory for the rest of his life. 

Peder Blake’s early paintings are quintessentially romantic, the product of a man awed by nature, overwhelmed by the often-horrifying beauty of his own land.

Long forgotten, Peder Balke is today increasingly recognized as an important precursor of modern painters.

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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...

by Francis Rousseau 

KVASSTINDEN & BREITINDEN PAINTED BY EVEN ULVING

 EVEN ULVING (1863 - 1952)
  Kvasstinden (1,010 m -3,313ft ) 
Breitinden (910 m - 2,985ft) 
Norway 

In  Motiv of Helgeland. Winter landscape with reindeer, oil on canvas, 1906,
Royal Palace Collection, Oslo

The mountains 
 Kvasstinden (1,010 m -3,313ft )  and Breitinden (910 m - 2,985ft) are part of the The Seven Sisters,  a mountainous massif of Norway located on the island of Alsten, in the county of Nordland, southwest of Mo i Rana. From north-east to south-west, the seven summits are:  Botnkrona (1,072 m - 3517ft)),  Grytfoten (1,019 m -3, 343ft),  Skjæringen (1,037 m- 3,402ft), Tvillingene ("the Twins") (945 m- 3,100ft  and 980 m - 3,215ft),  Kvasstinden  (1,010 m -3,313ft)  and  Breitinden (910 m - 2,985ft).

The painter 
Even Christophersen Ulving (was a Norwegian painter.  At the age of 18, he traveled to Kristiania to learn his craft with Wilhelm von Krogh  In 1883/84 he was a student at Knud Bergslien's painting school, in 1885/86 by Heinz Heim and Carl Frithjof Smith at the Kunstakademie in Munich, and in 1887 by William Adolphe Bouguereau at the Académie Julian in Paris.
Ulving painted naturalistic, mostly motifs from Helgeland or Vestfold . He especially understood how to portray the characteristic colors of the different seasons in a variety of often powerful tones, without causing any discord. His landscapes always show human activities or traces of it. He also likes to paint rural genre scenes in huts and living rooms.
Pictures of him hanging in the royal castle, and also the National Museum Oslo recently bought two works by him.
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2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau 

HEIRDUBREIT SKETCHED BY AASMUND FRISAK

AASMUND FRISAK (1852 – 1935) 

Herdubreit  (1,682 m - 5,518 ft)

Iceland

 In Herdubreit as seen from  Mördrudal, The British Library

The mountain 
Herdubreit  (1,682 m - 5,518 ft)   (Herðubreið in idelandic)) is a tuya in north-east Iceland.
A tuya is a type of distinctive, flat-topped, steep-sided volcano formed when lava erupts through a thick glacier or ice sheet. They are somewhat rare worldwide, being confined to regions which were covered by glaciers and had active volcanism during the same period.
Discovering and dating the lava flows in a tuya has proven useful in reconstructing past glacial ice extents and thicknesses.
Herdubreit  is situated in the Highlands of Iceland at the east side of the Ódáðahraun desert and close to Askja volcano. The desert is a large lava field originating from eruptions of Trölladyngja and other shield volcanoes in the area. Herðubreið was formed beneath the icesheet that covered Iceland during the last glacial period. Due to the mountain's steep and unstable sides, the first ascent was in 1908 despite centuries of knowledge of its existence. Near the mountain lies an oasis called Herðubreiðarlindir with a campground and hiking trails. In former times, outcasts who had been excluded from Icelandic society because of crimes they had committed lived at the oasis.[citation needed] One such outlaw was Fjalla-Eyvindur, who lived there during the winter of 1774–1775.

The artist 
Aasmund Frisak (20 March 1852 – 1935) was a Norwegian naval officer and politician for the Conservative Party. He graduated from the Norwegian Naval Academy in 1872. After running the sailors' school in Fredrikshald from 1878 to 1887 he returned to Horten as teacher at the Norwegian Naval Academy from 1891 to 1897. In 1897 he was hired at the Karljohansvern shipyard. He held the ranks of Captain from 1894 and Commander from 1899. He was also a local bank director. From 1901 to 1904 he served as mayor of Horten municipality, and he was elected to the Parliament of Norway in 1903, representing the rural constituency of Jarlsberg og Larviks Amt.

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2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau 

MONTE DURANNO BY CARL HUMMEL

Carl Hummel (1821-1907)

Monte Duranno  (2,652 m - 8, 700 ft) 

Italy 

In Ansicht von Pieve di Cadore, oil on canvas,  (130 x 180 cm), 1902, Private collection  

The mountain 

Mount Duranno  (2,652 m - 8, 700 ft)  is a mountain in the Friulian Dolomites, more precisely called the Dolomiti d 'Oltre Piave , in the Carnic Prealps in Italy . It is located between the Veneto (province of Belluno) and in Friuli-Venezia Giulia (province of Pordenone). It is a mountain of the Cima dei Preti Group -Duranno, partly included in the natural park of the Friulian Dolomites. One can climb the mountain from the Maniago refuge.

The painter

The german landcape painter and etcher Carl Maria Nicolaus Hummel was the son of Austrian composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel and the opera singer Elisabeth Röckel. His studies began in 1841 under Friedrich Preller at the Fürstliche freie Zeichenschule Weimar. After graduating, he made several study trips to England, Norway, Rügen and the Tyrol, lingering in Italy and Sicily until 1846. Upon his return, he settled in Weimar, where he became a professor at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School in 1860. His paintings focus primarily on the Italian and Tyrolean Alps. They are widely displayed at museums throughout Northern Europe, including the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris.

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2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau 

NORTHCAPE PAINTED BY THOROLF HOLMBOE

THOROLF HOLMBOE (1866-1935) 

North Cape (307m - 1,007 ft)

Norway

In Midnight Sun at the North Cap, oil on canvas

The cliff 
North Cape (307m - 1,007 ft), Nordkapp in  Norwegian, named by the Englishman Steven Borough, captain of the Edward Bonaventure, which sailed past in 1553 in search of the Northeast Passage, is a cape on the northern coast of the island of Magerшya in Northern Norway. The cape is in Nordkapp Municipality in Finnmark county, Norway. The European route E69 highway has its northern terminus at North Cape, since it is a popular tourist attraction. The cape includes a 307 metres (1,007 ft) high cliff with a large flat plateau on top where visitors can stand and watch the midnight sun or the views of the Barents Sea to the north.
The North Cape is the point where the Norwegian Sea, part of the Atlantic Ocean, meets the Barents Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean. The midnight sun can be seen from 14 May to the 31st of July.
During winter season, it is also possible to visit North Cape, however the last stretch of road is only open for convoy driving at fixed hours. The road all the way through Norway up to North Cape is kept open during winter and is accessible to regular vehicles with some specific winter precautions being required to deal with the hard snow and wind conditions that may occur in winter.
Before this, E69 was the only winter closed E road in Europe.

The painter 

Thorolf Holmboe (10 May 1866 – 8 March 1935) was a Norwegian painter, illustrator and designer.
He was born in Vefsn, in Nordland county. He studied under Hans Gude in Berlin between 1886 and 1887 and Fernand Cormon in Paris between 1889 and 1891. He was inspired by many different styles at different points in his career, including Naturalism, Neo-romanticism, Realism and Impressionism. He is represented with thirteen works in the National Gallery of Norway.

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2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau 

MOUNT WHITNEY PAINTED BY PAUL LAURITZ

    

                                                          PAUL LAURITZ (1889–1975)

Mount Whitney  (4,421 m - 14,505 ft)

United States of America (California) 

 In The High Sierras,  oil on canvas, circa 1929 , The  Crocker Art Museum 

The mountain 
Mount Whitney (4,421 m - 14,505 ft) is the tallest mountain in California, as well as the highest summit in the contiguous United States and the Sierra Nevada.  It is in Central California, on the boundary between California's Inyo and Tulare counties. The west slope of the mountain is in Sequoia National Park and the summit is the southern terminus of the John Muir Trail which runs 211.9 mi (341.0 km) from Happy Isles in Yosemite Valley. The east slope is in the Inyo National Forest in Inyo County.
The rise is caused by a normal fault system that runs along the eastern base of the Sierra, below Mount Whitney. Thus, the granite that forms Mount Whitney is the same as the granite that forms the Alabama Hills, thousands of feet lower down.  The raising of Whitney (and the downdrop of the Owens Valley) is due to the same geological forces that cause the Basin and Range Province: the crust of much of the intermontane west is slowly being stretched.
In July 1864, the members of the California Geological Survey named the peak after Josiah Whitney, the State Geologist of California and benefactor of the survey.

The painter 
Born in a small art colony of  Norway, Lauritz was exposed to art at an early age, studying with local and foreign artists in Larvik. At age 16 he moved to eastern Canada to live with his sister and found work as a hardrock driller in a mine. Working his way west, he worked as a commercial artist in Vancouver and Portland, OR where he began painting landscapes and portraits. The meager existence in artwork led him to Alaska with the Gold Rush. Unsuccessful as a miner, he again turned to painting and became a close friend of artist Sydney Laurence. The two artists held a joint exhibition before Lauritz left Alaska. In 1919 he settled in Los Angeles and established a studio-home in the Lyceum Theatre on Spring Street. When not teaching at the Chouinard and Otis Art Institutes
or in his studio, he made painting excursions to the Sierra, up the California coast as far north as Carmel, to Mexico (1921), the Columbia River (1924), and Norway (1925).
While in his native land, he was commissioned by the King of Norway to do a painting for the royal palace. Lauritz was an involved member of the Los Angeles art community and served for six years on the Los Angeles Municipal Art Commission. A versatile painter, his diverse subjects include desert scenes, portraits, snow scenes, marines and landscapes.

2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
Un blog de Francis Rousseau, #BlogWanderingVertexes, #mountainpaintings

MOUNT KHUMBILA / KHUMBU YUL-LHA BY HEINRICH C. BERANN

HEINRICH C. BERANN  (1915-1999)

Mount Khumbila / Khumbu Yul-Lha (5,761 m- 18, 901ft) 

Nepal 

In Kumbu Himal map, 1950 for National Geographic 

The mountain 

Mount Khumbila or Khumbu Yul-Lha (5,761 m- 18, 901ft)  roughly translated as "God of Khumbu" is one of the high Himalayan peaks in the Khumbu region of Eastern Nepal within the boundaries of Sagarmatha National Park. Considered too sacred to be climbed by most local Sherpa people, the mountain is considered home to the patron God of the local area. The mountain overlooks the famous southern approaches to its larger neighbours including Ama Dablam and Mount Everest.

Khumbila has never been climbed; one attempt prior to the 1980s ended when climbers were killed in an avalanche, and there have been no subsequent attempts.

Khumbila is said to be a god, and an old one. The prayers for Khumbila are believed to date back to the time when the ancestors of the Sherpas were still in Tibet (more than 500 years ago). Khumbila is said to have been subdued and converted to Buddhism by Guru Rimpoche, the 8th-century saint who spread Buddhism throughout the Himalaya . In fact, Guru Rimpoche is said to have spent some time meditating in a cave above Khunde, perhaps on the mountain Khumbila itself.

Local buildings often have prayer flags on bamboo wands to honour Khumbila.

The artist

Heinrich C. Berann, (1915–1999) the father of the modern panorama map, was born into a family of painters and sculptors in Innsbruck, Austria. He taught himself by trial and error. In the years 1930-1933 he attended the arts and design school "Bundeslehranstalt für Malerei" in Innsbruck.

Winning of first prize at a competition for a panorama map created great enthusiasm in him. Using his artistic heritage and new self-discovered techniques he invented a new way of painting landscapes for tourist purposes. The further development of both these panorama maps and his artistic style was influenced by lasting impressions he received during his military service in German Army in Norway and Northern Finland in 1942.

In 1962 he painted Mount Everest for the National Geographic Society, one of his most famous panoramic maps. He worked with Marie Tharp and Bruce C. Heezen to produce maps of the entire ocean floor in 1977.

He later created four panoramas for the United States National Park Service: Yellowstone National Park, North Cascades National Park, Yosemite National Park and finally Mt. McKinley National Park (now Denali). He was very sick when he painted Denali (above) - but he finished it in the age of 81.

In 2000, Tom Patterson of the National Park Service explored ways of digitally creating panoramas like Berann did for the Park Service.

HIGRAVSTINDEN PAINTED BY THOROLF HOLMBOE

 THOROLF HOLMBOE (1866-1935) 

Higravstinden (1,146 m - 3,760 ft) 

Norway 

In  Fishing village, Lofoten, oil on canvas, 

The mountain 

Higravstinden or Higravstindan  (1,146 m - 3,760 ft) is the tallest mountain on the island of Austvеgшya in the Lofoten archipelago. It is located on the border of the municipalities of Hadsel and Vеgan in Nordland county, Norway. The village of Laupstad and the European route E10 highway are located about 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of the mountain and the village of Liland is located about 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) southwest of the mountain. 

There is a glacier located on the east side of the mountain.

The painter 

Thorolf Holmboe (10 May 1866 – 8 March 1935) was a Norwegian painter, illustrator and designer.
He was born in Vefsn, in Nordland county. He studied under Hans Gude in Berlin between 1886 and 1887 and Fernand Cormon in Paris between 1889 and 1891. He was inspired by many different styles at different points in his career, including Naturalism, Neo-romanticism, Realism and Impressionism. He is represented with thirteen works in the National Gallery of Norway.

2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau