Thomas FEARNLEY (1802-1842)

Summer Afternoon in a Mountain Valley, year 1830, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right Th. Fearnley 1830, painting dimensions 88 × 121 cm, overall dimensions with frame 119 × 151 cm.

Provenance: important aristocratic collection

Thomas Fearnley was a distinguished Norwegian Romantic artist, traveler, and highly talented landscape painter. He attended the leading Dresden studio of the painter Johan Christian Dahl, who stated that Fearnley was by far the most talented of all his students.
He was born in Halden, formerly Frederikshald, a small town in southeastern Norway, just a few kilometers from the Swedish-Norwegian border. However, he grew up in Oslo, where he was expected to pursue either a military career or work in his uncle’s business. At the age of eighteen, he answered the call of the painter’s palette, which had captivated him, and enrolled at the newly established Academy of Painting there.
He lived a very intense life and quite literally traveled across Europe with his fellow artists. He studied at all the Scandinavian academies — in addition to the already mentioned Oslo (1819–21), also in Copenhagen (1821–23) and Stockholm (1823–27). In 1829 he left to study in Dresden with the painter Dahl, where he studied alongside Caspar David Friedrich and Carl Gustav Carus.
After a year and a half, he moved to Munich in Bavaria, where he spent two wonderful years, and then set out on foot on a seven-hundred-kilometre pilgrimage to Rome. He did not return to Munich until 1835, and even then by quite a detour. He visited France and especially England, where he became acquainted with the brilliant painter Turner.
In 1840 he married the daughter of his patron, and a year later their son Thomas was born in Amsterdam. He died in Munich at the age of thirty-nine during a typhus epidemic. He devoted himself to landscape painting, plein-air oil studies, and left behind a large collection of drawings.