The Labro Falls at Kongsberg
- Artist: Thomas Fearnley
- Creation date: 1837
- Object type: Maleri
About
Thomas Fearnley is the cosmopolite of earlynineteenth- century Norwegian art. After studying first at the academies in Copenhagen and Stockholm and then under J.C. Dahl in Dresden, he spent a few years in Munich before moving on to Italy, Switzerland, France, and England. He then lived for a while in Norway, spent a winter in Amsterdam, and died in Munich not quite forty years old.
Fearnley had learned from Dahl to be true to nature when making sketches. He had also learned – both in Stockholm and from his encounter with the Munich school – to compose paintings that were detached from the immediate impressions of the landscape. In The Labro Falls at Kongsberg, Fearnley converted his sketches into a spectacular landscape with gloomy overtones.
The picture’s middle ground is dominated by the rapids, while further into the foreground the river forms an elliptical stage, with the trees to the left serving as a sidewing that adds depth. The foreground is shadowy, while the waterfall and the logs on the bank are sharply illuminated. Clouds hang heavy over the forested mountainsides, allowing brighter hills to create a sense of depth. It is this fascination with the forces of nature, as frightening as they are alluring, that make romantic landscape paintings sublime. The severely miniaturized human forms so typical of romanticism helps underscore the vastness of the landscape. By scrutinizing the painting we discover loggers, a woman blowing a wooden horn, and an eagle that symbolizes the forces of nature. The meticulously detailed depiction of the foreground testifies to Fearnley’s education from the academy in Copenhagen, where the study of botanical details in nature was strongly encouraged.
Text: Frode Haverkamp
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