Danish Landscape
Harald Slott-Møller (Danish, 1864–1937)
1891
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- height 41 cm, width 70 cm, height 71 cm, width 94.7 cm
- Culture
- Danish
- Museum
- SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
About this work
Slott-Møller incorporates the frame as part of the work. In so doing he abolishes the conventional distinctions between art and craft, bringing him perfectly in line with the English artists of the age. With Danish Landscape, Harald Slott-Møller ushered in his new Symbolist outlook in 1891. Combining different materials and techniques Inspired by the English Arts & Crafts movement he abolished the conventional distinctions between art and crafts (or “decorative” art) by combining different materials and techniques. Even so, combining a cast-iron relief of an ear of corn with a naturalistically painted Danish summer landscape complete with a stork and blue skies is Slott-Møller’s own original take on the task at hand: creating a contemporary image to represent the fertility of the Danish countryside. The storck and the corn as symbols The gilt plate, the incorporation of the frame as an element with real significance to the total idiom, and the decorative stork symmetrically placed between the white clouds all ensure that the somewhat heavy-handed fertility symbols - the stork and the grain - do not make spectators take recourse in Danish patriotic art idioms when…
