Peder Mork Monsted Paintings

Peder Mork Monsted [Danish Painter, 1859-1941]

Peder Mork Monsted was one of a group of young Scandinavian landscape painters who transfigured the atmospheric techniques and localised motifs of the Barbizon School and the Impressionists to achieve a renaissance in northern landscape painting.  In Charlottenlund Forest, Winter has its roots in Impressionism; however the unique northern light and the radiance of snow in Scandinavia is the paintings central motif.  Monsted created a distinctive Danish plein-air painting of unmatched beauty.

 

Monsted’s wide ranging education helped him to assimilate the virtuoso techniques of academic naturalism but he transformed these devices to create a photo – realist artistic style all his own which won him great acclaim and affluence in his own life time.  The entry on Monsted in the Weilbach Dansk Kunstnerleksikon eloquently characterises the artist’s achievement: ‘(Monsted’s) great success was largely a consequence of his ability to develop a series of schematic types of landscape, which could each individually represent the quintessence of a Scandinavian, Italian, or most frequently Danish landscape.  In motifs, built up around still water, trees and forest, he specialised in portraying the sunlight between tree crowns and the network of trunks and branches of the underwood, the reflections on the water of forest and sky and snow-laden winter landscapes with sensations of spring, often all together in the same picture.  Insofar as Mǿnsted included figures in his pictures, these were principally used as ornaments with a view to emphasising the idyllic character of the motif; and only rarely were the figures and the anecdotal element given as prominent a role as in traditional genre pictures.’

 

Monsted was born near Grenaa in December 1859.  He went on to study at the Academy of Copenhagen.  During his life he travelled extensively in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.  He exhibited in Charlottenborg and became known as a skilled painter of landscapes and forests in snow.

 

The work of Monsted is represented in the Museum of Aalborg, Denmark and the Museum of Bautzen, Denmark.