Cows being Watered at a Village Pond. Brofelde, Zealand

Download3000 × 1807 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Johan Lundbye (Danish, 1818–1848)
Medium: Oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Size: 25.5 × 41.5 cm
Museum: SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
Rights: Public Domain Mark

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.