The Land of the Midnight Sun: Norway’s Golden Age of Painting
Wednesday 2nd February 2022
North Cape, 1853
Peder Balke
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Image in the public domain.
Stella Grace Lyons
The late 19th century marked a defining moment in Norway. For the first time romantic painters began to turn to their own land for inspiration. They painted the stormy seas, the towering glaciers and the raw, untamed nature of their homeland. Their aim was to draw attention to the beauty of their country and explore what it meant to be ‘Norwegian’.
This lecture will look at the artists from Norway’s ‘Golden Age’ who captured the far north with drama and romance and interpreted their wild country as a mythical, eerie entity. It will explore the stunning works of JC Dahl, Peder Balke, Nikolai Astrup and Harald Sohlberg. This is chance to discover some of art’s most underappreciated artists.
Stella Grace Lyons gained her BA in the History of Art from the University of Bristol and her MA in History of Art from the University of Warwick. She spent a year studying Renaissance art at the British Institute of Florence, and three months studying Venetian art in Venice. She also attended drawing classes at the prestigious Charles H. Cecil studios in Florence, a private atelier that follows a curriculum based on the leading ateliers of nineteenth century Paris.
Stella is a freelance Art History lecturer, speaker and writer who has lectured across the UK, Ireland, Spain, Norway, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. She is also a part-time lecturer for the University of South Wales. She has written about art for several publications and her article on Norwegian art was recently featured on the front cover of The Arts Society magazine.
