Peder Mork Monsted (Kunst)

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Born at the end of the “golden age” of Danish painting, Peder Mork Monsted (1859-1941) can be described as a product of that era. A landscape painter renowned for the clarity of light common to the painters of that age, his naturalistic “plain air” view paintings made Monsted the leading Danish landscape artist of his age.

Monsted was born in Balle near Ganaa in eastern Denmark. As a child Peder was a student at the Crown Prince Ferdinand’s Drawing School in Arhus, under Andreas Fritz, a landscape and portrait painter. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen between 1875 and 1876, a, and was taught figure painting by Julius Exner (1825-1910). He was much influenced by his teacher Andries Fritz, court painter to Prince Ferdinand. Monsted was also influenced by the paintings of artists such as Christen Kobke (1810-1848), an outstanding colorist and Pieter Christian Skorgaard (1817-1875). Monsted´s style developed further in the studio of Peder Severin Kroyer and through a brief period with William Adolphe Bouguereau in Paris in 1882-83.

Monsted traveled extensively throughout his long career, being a frequent visitor to Switzerland, Italy and North Africa. As early as 1884, Monsted visited North Africa returning later in the decade. The early part of the 20th century, Monsted returned to Switzerland, the south of France and Italy, the latter being the source of inspiration for many Scandinavian artists of the nineteenth century. World War I curtailed Monsted’s travel to Norway and Sweden, however the 1920’s and 1930’s Monsted returned to the Mediterranean. Throughout his long career, Monsted continued to paint the Danish landscape and coastline. His is a romantic, poetic painting of nature; Monsted was an artist who depicted the grandeur and monumental aspect of the landscape, with a remarkable eye for detail and color. His work was frequently exhibited in the Paris and Munich Salons. He is widely recognized for his luminous winter snow landscape oil paintings often featuring water, which demonstrate an almost photographic quality and supreme technical skill.

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 (Weilbach Danish Artist Lexicon) eloquently characterizes 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 specialized 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 landscape paintings with sensations of spring, often all together in the same painting. Insofar as Monsted included figures in his paintings, these were principally used as ornaments with a view to emphasizing 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 paintings.’
•Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen
•The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark (former Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum)
•The Dahesh Museum in Brooklyn
•Chi-Mei Museum, Taiwan
•Monsted’s works were also included in a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Nordic National Galleries in 2006-2007 entitled, “A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting”. This exhibition traveled to Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
http://galeriemichael.com/artists/monsted-peder-mork/