Golden Age Painting

The golden age of painting in Denmark occurred during the 19th century, beginning in the early 1800's into the late 1800s with the school of painting called Skain. During this period, the landscape  was used often as a key subject in painting, and was created in a way to highlight its importance to Danish culture and as a way to cope with difficult times. The landscape was portrayed as being incredibly beautiful, often beyond reality, and almost always of scenes of open expanses of nature in the summer time, with fluffy clouds, open fields and happy looking subjects. One painting showed fishermen and their wives, hard at work but seemingly content. These paintings served as a political tool, as the fine arts academy of Denmark was highly influenced by prominent social and political figures of the time, and served as a way to improve the morality of Danish people during difficult times. The following image shows how nature was portrayed as being more powerful than man, as the sky and water take up much more area of the painting than the giant castle, and the figures are minuscule. This is in line with the ideals of romanticism, which glorified nature and the mystery and beauty of the landscape. 

In the paintings, the brush stroke was thought to be a sign of poor quality of the work, and the artists tried to make the paintings as photo realistic as possible. 

After the invention of the camera, the artists began to use more painterly techniques, and were more willing to experiment with less idyllic imagery. In this painting, issues of descrepencies between the sexes are adressed, as a girl stands sadly by the ocean in a dress while a group of boys have fun splashing naked in the ocean. The space is still beautiful and the expanse of nature is vast compared to the subjects, but the content is slightly less positive.