Adolph Tidemand

In the 1840s Norway was hunting for a picture of itself. Tied in a union with Sweden and only a generation past four centuries under Denmark, it wanted images that felt distinctly Norwegian, and Adolph Tidemand set out to supply them. Trained in Copenhagen and then in Düsseldorf, the German town whose art school drew painters from across Europe, he spent his summers travelling through the western valleys, sketching farmers in their Sunday costumes, their weddings and their prayer meetings.

His best-known work he did not paint alone. In 1848, with the young landscape painter Hans Gude, he made 'Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord' — Gude laid in the mountains and still water, Tidemand the wedding party crossing in rowing boats, the groom tipping his hat, the bride in her crown and red Hardanger dress. It hangs in the National Museum in Oslo. Another canvas, 'Low Church Devotion' from 1848, shows a lay preacher's followers gathered in a smoky log room, the plain religious movement that spread through the Norwegian countryside in his lifetime.