Thomas Fearnley Norwegian, 1802-1842

Hofjægermester Fearnley (the artist's son)
Thence by descent to the artist's great-granddaughter
Inherited from the above by the present owner in 1994

Three Works by Thomas Fearnley from a British Private Collector (lots 134-136)

Thomas Fearnley 1802-1842

The foremost pupil of Johan Christian Dahl and an acquaintance of Caspar David Friedrich, during his short life Thomas Fearnley established himself as the most distinguished Norwegian landscape painter of his generation. An inveterate traveller, he responded to the huge variety of landscapes that he crossed in his quest to record nature and his changing surroundings.  

Born in south east Norway, he first studied at the newly established Royal School of Drawing in Christiania. In 1821 he moved to Copenhagen and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art. In Stockholm in 1823 he worked with the Swedish painter Carl Johan Fahlkrantz. Returning to Norway by 1826, it was there that he first met Dahl, accompanying him on a sketching tour to Sogn. Fearnley joined Dahl in Dresden as his pupil in 1829, but unlike his compatriot he could not remain there for any length of time. In 1830 he visited Prague, Nuremberg and Salzberg and in 1832 arrived in Munich. But by Christmas of the same year he was in Rome, and spent the next three years discovering the Italian landscape. Returning north, he passed through Switzerland in 1835 and visited Paris, London and Copenhagen in 1836. After summering in Norway, he was back in London in October 1836, where he remained for the following two years, during which time he visited the Lake District. Back on the road in 1838 he returned to Dresden where he called in on Dahl and Friedrich, and also visited Düsseldorf. In 1840 he moved to Amsterdam, and then in1842 he was once more in Munich. It was there that he fell victim to a typhus epidemic and died aged just thirty-nine.

*****Note for Vesuvius (lot 134)*****

Fearnley's travels in Italy between 1832 and 1835 provided him with a particularly rich source of new subjects, the Mediterranean sunlight contributing a new sense of harmony to his compositions. As Ernst Haverkamp writes of Fearnley's Italian period: 'The intensity of light (...)  became a dominant concern, whether reflected on the sea, deflected by terraces, pergolas and trees, vibrating on a whitewashed wall, or shimmering in a distant lilac haze' (Nature's Way, Romantic Landscapes from Norway, Manchester, 1993, exh. cat., p. 24).