Johan Thomas Lundbye

1818 – 1848

Danish painter. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen, where he finished in 1842. He began exhibiting in 1835. In the years to come he would focus his painting on depicting landscapes. He received a travel grant from the Academy in 1845, which was renewed a year later. He traveled through Germany (Altona, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Mainz, Strasbourg), over the Rhine to Switzerland (Basel, Geneva) to France (Marseille), and then to Italy. He returned to Denmark after a year and half and bought a little farm near Helsingør. The First War of Schleswig, known in Denmark as the Three Years' War broke out, and in the spring of 1848 he enlisted in the army like many other young artists. He died eight days later due to an accidental shot (or perhaps suicide). He was a promising artist, inspired by the art historian Niels Laurits Høyen's (1798-1870) call to develop a Danish nationalistic art by exploring as motif the characteristic landscapes, the historical buildings and monuments, and the simple, rural people of Denmark. He became one of his generation's national romantic painters, along with Peter Christian Skovgaard and Lorenz Frølich, to regularly depict the landscape of Zeeland.

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