Sunset. Fontainebleau

Valdemar Schønheyder Møller, 1900

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Artist: Valdemar Schønheyder Møller (Danish, 1864–1905)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 116.2 × 88.3 cm
Museum: SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
Rights: Public Domain Mark

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.