ABSTRACTS Another Horizon Session 1 Asher E. Miller, Assistant Curator, Department of European Paintings The Metropolitan Museum of Art Northerners in Italy: Interaction, Transmission, Collaboration The point of departure for this talk is the Metropolitan Museum’s holdings of early nineteenth-century paintings and oil sketches by northern European artists working in Rome and Naples. Featuring works by figures ranging from Eckersberg and Koch to Catel and Granet, as well as their younger contemporaries, the Met’s collection was formed in recent years through a combination of curatorial initiative and the passion of local private collectors: it is, therefore, still in its youth. This presentation addresses questions of interaction, transmission, and collaboration between northern artists stemming from the research and display of these pictures. Specific areas of focus include artists of various national origins looking closely at the same iconic motifs, artists learning from one another’s methods and works, and artistic partnerships, notably between Heinrich Reinhold and Johann Joachim Faber, who sketched together at Olevano Romano in the early 1820s. Jens Peter Munk, MA (History of Art) Copenhagen Life among foreign artists in Rome as seen from a Danish perspective In my monograph on Danish Golden Age painter Jørgen Roed (2013) I dedicated a chapter to the life of Danish artists in Rome at that time. I focused in detail on their living and working conditions and their interaction with the local artistic environment as well as with other foreign artists staying in the city for an extended period of time. In this paper I wish to touch on some aspects of this vast theme. Being abroad gave the artists great freedom, but there were also a number of practical and theoretical issues they had to deal with. Where would they find suitable board and lodging? How were they to fit into the various factions and trends on the art scene? And how could they navigate under the prevailing political and religious conditions and discourses? As well as being inspired by the art treasures of Italy the principal reason for the artists’ sojourn was to make oil sketches and drawings for later use once they were back home. Time and money were rapidly consumed, to the artists’ great frustration, but youthful exuberance and good fellowship enabled them to make the most of whatever opportunities they had. Sine Krogh, mag.art., Copenhagen Friendships in the age of Romanticism. The Portrait Painter C.A. Jensen in Rome The most remarkable output of the portrait painter C.A. Jensen’s Italian sojourn 1818-1821 was not the copying of Old Masters in the galleries of Rome or Florence, nor the study of Antiquity, which were the main reasons for artists travelling to Italy in the nineteenth century. The significant result was eight small portraits of the painter’s circle of friends reflecting the importance of fellowship, of what Rome also meant socially for artists, that is finding a place among the like-minded in communities less conventional that the ones they left at home. In this regard Rome was the perfect incubator for forming friendships, for making the transition from having recently trained to become an artist, to finding a way of expressing one’s new artistic identity and for visualising the impulses that the Romantic culture of friendship gave rise to. Taking Jensen’s portraits as its starting point, this paper addresses the artistic and sociological aspects of friendships among artists in Rome where exchanges of portraits was a way of networking and where emotional communities played an important role. Dr. Jan D. Cox, University of Leeds Thomas Fearnley in Italy: Industry, sociability, liminality. The Norwegian painter Thomas Fearnley set off for Rome in September 1832 in the company of two other artists, the Dane Wilhelm Bendz and the German Joseph Petzl. However, of the trio who set out from Munich, only Fearnley was to spend time painting in Southern Italy; the unfortunate Bendz was to die in Vicenza soon after parting company with his friends, while Petzl was swiftly lured away by the rival attractions of Greece and Constantinople. Fearnley spent two-and-a-half years in Italy, based in Rome, but visiting Sorrento, Capri and Sicily. He was a likeable man, described as being ‘strong as a lion…good-tempered as a lamb’. Although his time in Italy was highly industrious, he still found time for wine, food, socialising and romance. This paper places an emphasis on Fearnley’s substantial production of oil sketches, exemplified by those that feature the English heiress Frances Worthington. I examine Fearnley’s response to the contrast in cultural values between Norway and Italy, and the dynamic role that Fearnley’s Italian works played in later depictions of his homeland. PD. Dr. Golo Maurer, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Universität Wien/Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome Failing in Rome I have been working since many years on the perception of Italian landscape by German artists and travelers as part of the formation of national identity in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of my results I recently published as Habilitation theses (Golo Maurer, Italien als Erlebnis und Vorstellung. Landschaftswahrnehmung deutscher Künstler und Reisender 1760-1870, Regesburg 2015, 428 pgs.). I would be interested in holding a paper about Rome and Italy as place of failure. Rome has since the 17th century been generally regarded as a centre for artistic inspiration, rivalled only periodically by Paris. Thousands of northern artists followed this myth hoping for inspiration and success. For many however Rome turned out to be a delusion, if not a trap. Collective expectations and stiff artistic conventions often blocked every individual approach. I would concentrate on the aspect of failure and creative crisis connected to the Italian sojourn, a widespread but rarely analyzed phenomenon especially within the hermetic structures of artistic colonies in Rome and Olevano. It is therefore not surprising, that the most innovative contributions came from artists who kept away from these communities. Session 2 Torsten Gunnarsson, Stockholm Nordic Open-Air Oil Sketching in Italy c. 1810-1850. Origins, practice, technique and contemporary evaluation Although occasionally mentioned during the 17th century open-air oil sketching became more common during the later part of the 18th. It was promoted by the enlightenment´s rising interest in nature as well as by a new demand for a realistic representation of nature in art. Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg became the Nordic open-air pioneer followed by, among others, the Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl, his compatriot Thomas Fearnley and the Swedes Gustaf Söderberg and Gustaf Wilhelm Palm. In this paper I will discuss questions like: • From where did Nordic artists get their inspiration to paint oil sketches outdoors? • What kind of equipment was used? • Were all studies painted in just one session? • How were oil studies used in the studio and how do they correspond to the studio works? • Did oil sketching create a special style? • Can the oil sketching practice be regarded as the beginning of Nordic open-air painting during the 1870´s and 80´s? Carl-Johan Olsson, Stockholm Expectation, experience and memory- oil sketches in the light of studio works and vice versa My intention with this paper is to study the relation between oil sketches by Scandinavian artists executed en plein air in Italy and paintings executed in the artist’s studio. Over the last decades, focus primarily has been on sketches and studio works have attracted less attention. What conclusions about relations between these two can be drawn interpreting works of the respective category in terms of expectation, experience and memory? And in terms of Romantic aesthetics? In relation to studio works, I will also reflect on what can be considered the core of the sketches. Are they merely registrations or are there dimensions of deeper significance later “transcribed” into the studio works? I will use works by Johan Christian Dahl, Gustaf Wilhelm Palm, Thomas Fearnley and Constantin Hansen as examples. Alexander Kaczmarczyk M.A., Frankfurt/Main “New” classical fragments ‒ Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg’s landscape and genre paintings Before Eckersberg came to Rome in 1813 he had been working under the aegis of Jacques-Louis David for almost two years. While in Paris he had produced innovative works with epic issues from the antiquity involving a dialectical formal pattern. As a contradictory principle it derived its meaning from the philosophical context of dialectics. Through the medium of art it came to be considered as an endless interplay between fundamental opposites, something which is evident in Eckersberg’s paintings. He thus reflected upon contemporary theories linked both to “romantic speculative physics” and to the leading questions of how to create a novel epic work through the use of modern reflective methods. By analogy to the polar principles in physical nature the “old” (Classical) and the “young” (Romantic) were conceptualised as polar opposites e.g. as “solid” and “fluid” in terms of “rectangular contoured order” and “chaotic event”, which appeared then in turn to be a dialectic unity in modern artwork. His paintings, following this concept structurally, constitute an infinite progression of polar change as fragments. In Rome, Eckersberg transferred that pattern to his views of the urban area in order to argue for a new epic work, through which the universal spirit, i.e. the “truth”, would reveal itself. Karina Lykke Grand, Ass. Professor, Art History, Aarhus University Tourists in Rome? – Travel images and writings by Danish painters 1830-1855 Danish painters travelling to Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century longed to experience the untouched Arcadia of ancient Rome, which they had only heard of from earlier travellers and read about in travel writings back in Denmark.