Dying Primeval Forest

Eastern Norway began to feature in Norwegian landscape painting with the advent of the Düsseldorf painters. August Cappelen, a member of this group, often found inspiration from his local haunts near Holden in Telemark. The deep sense of melancholy found in many of his paintings culminates in this painting, which he left unfinished upon his death in 1852 at the tender age of 25.

It is not broad panoramas but rather intimate portraits of closed-off, secluded areas that typify Cappelen’s landscapes. Precise details must nevertheless yield here to broad strokes of the brush, and Cappelen’s lyrical, dramatic sense of nature infuses the fantastic, halfway symbolic scenery with a touch of the chillingly macabre; in so doing, he managed to depict the mysteries of nature better than most. On his deathbed Cappelen supposedly fantasized about the primeval forests of South America, and in Decaying Forest, his own, unfinished picture of ancient woodland, a mountain breaks up into clefts while rotting, scarred trunks and stumps extend from the foreground toward the background, resembling a battlefield. The composition culminates in the silhouette of the large pine tree against the yellow afternoon sky.

Decaying Forest epitomizes Cappelen’s atmospheric, innovative colouring and his ability to arrange landscape elements within a firm, steady composition. Cappelen was close to his teacher Hans Gude, but he was also heavily influenced by the classical landscapes of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (1807–1863), a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy.