Allaert van Everdingen

In 1644 a young Dutch painter boarded a ship for the Baltic, and a storm blew it off course onto the coast of Norway. Allaert van Everdingen, then in his early twenties, spent the delay drawing what he saw: pine forests, log cabins, and above all the mountain torrents crashing over rock, scenery no one back in the flat Dutch Republic had ever painted.

Home in Haarlem and later Amsterdam, he built a whole career out of that accident. He worked the annotated sketches from his months in south-east Norway and around Göteborg in Sweden into paintings, drawings, and etchings of rugged Nordic country, and made the waterfall a fashionable subject in a land that has none. The taste he started outlived him. The great landscapist Jacob van Ruisdael took up the Scandinavian torrent after seeing Everdingen's work, without ever going north himself.

Everdingen also cut a long series of etchings for the old beast-fable of Reynard the Fox, the sly medieval trickster. His earliest dated Scandinavian landscape is from 1646, the year after he came home.