The early 19th century was the age of national landscape painting because, at a time of revolution and political instability, it offered painters and their audiences a way of reassessing their own country's characteristics and place in the world. Topography, whether British, German or North American, was as individual as a fingerprint and Norwegian and Swiss artists were no more immune to this pervading mood than were Turner or Caspar David Friedrich.
The two countries shared physical similarities that were meat and drink to painters-mountains, vertiginous views, frothing rivers, hanging woods — but were in all other respects opposites. Switzerland was independent, central and prosperous while Norway was a poor Swedish chattel, sat on the serrated edge of the Continent. Where Norway was rich was in the drama of its landscape, and painting it was one way of joining Europe's elite.
While many of the pictures on display are straightforward exercises in the Sublime some of the painters deserve wider recognition, among them Johan Christian Dahl — a friend of Friedrich's and the father of Norwegian painting — pupil Thomas Fearnley and Caspar Wolf. But two artists in particular stand out: the Norwegian Peder Balke (1804-1887) and the Swiss Alexandre Calame (1810-1864). Their work has an intensity that belongs to a higher, mystical stratum of Romantic art. Calame's pictures combine microscopic geological exactitude with the most sweeping of atmospheric effects while Balke's forgo reality altogether and replace it with a Wagnerian moodiness.
Balke trained as a scene painter and the pictures he created after a visit to the North Cape in 1832 condense the techniques of his training — all thin paint and scrapings and wipings —to pocket size. His pictures of raging seas and distant mountains thrum with the howl of winds and the crash of Arctic seas; they may be near monochromatic but the effect is hallucinatory. Balke's career died in his own lifetime but his depiction of nature was as idiosyncratic as Samuel Palmer's in this country and this exhibition offers an overdue introduction to a distinctive painter.
