The Narrative of National Romanticism in 19th-Century Painting: The Danish Golden Age and Beyond

This paper explores landscape paintings from the Danish Golden Age (ca. 1800-1850) in the narrative of Northern European national romanticism. The Danish Golden Age is renowned for its landscape painting, which depicts an idealized version of the region and is closely linked to historical events and national identity building during a turbulent time in northern Europe. At the same time, landscape painting also flourished in other neighbouring countries, notably Germany, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Despite the strong connection of national romanticism to its region and current political events, artists were mobile and traveled to different hubs – such as Copenhagen, Dresden and Düsseldorf – to hone their craft. In the light of these entangled relationships, we investiagte the nature of national romanticism between style, motif and story telling. We implement machine learning and feature space exploration methods to investigate art historical storytelling in relation to visualization and statistical processing. By doing so, we aim to analyse the very notion of national romanticism as an evolving narrative.

This research is supported by grants from the Carlsberg Foundation (The Golden Array of Danish Cultural Heritage) and Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond (Golden Imprints of Danish Cultural Heritage).