Sunset. Fontainebleau

Valdemar Schønheyder Møller (Danish, 1864–1905)

1900

Medium
Oil on canvas
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
height 116.2 cm, width 88.3 cm, height 139.7 cm, width 111 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 his stay in Paris around the turn of the century Valdemar Schønheyder Møller experimented wit painting landscapes viewed directly against the sun. In the forest view from Fontainebleau he appears to have gone further than in any other painting. He has looked towards the sun between the tress, but the sunlight has taken on such brightness that the lowest parts of the tree trunks appear to dissolve in a sea of fire and lose all their material substance. Similar attempts to capture the intense, almost destructive sunlight were made by a number of other European painters at the same time, especially by the Italian Giuseppe Pellizza and the Pole Wojciech Weiss.