Cows being Watered at a Village Pond. Brofelde, Zealand
Johan Thomas Lundbye (Danish, 1818–1848)
1844
- Medium
- Oil on paper, mounted on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- height 25.5 cm, width 41.5 cm, height 32.9 cm, width 48.9 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
During their summer outings, landscape painters would paint in a freer manner in their open-air studies compared to their large, carefully finished studio paintings. However, they had large-scale paintings in mind as they were painting out in the open. This can be clearly felt in this painting. The study is small, but the thoughts behind it are big. Lundbye carefully selected his position so that he could utilise the hilly shapes and undulating lines of the landscape to create a prominent reversed S shape that links up all the parts of the composition to form a uniform whole, leading our gaze out into the distance. He worked with lines in a manner completely different to that of Eckersberg and his students. Lundbye hoped to be encouraged to paint the motif on a large scale, but no such encouragement ever came, and he never executed the large version planned. However, this composition shares the same monumental qualities that Lundbye showed in his large-scale paintings.
