Julius Fedders

The Gauja Valley, painted in 1891, is a broad canvas more than a metre and a half wide, showing the valley of the river that winds through Vidzeme in northern Latvia. It belongs to the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. Julius Fedders, known in Latvian as Jūlijs Feders, painted such places with close attention to their real terrain, plants and light, and Latvian art history counts him as the founder of landscape painting in the country.

He was born in 1838 in Koknese, on the Daugava, and in 1856 entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, where he studied landscape under Sokrat Vorobiev. From 1863 he taught drawing at the secondary school in Jelgava, also worked as a photographer from 1868, and travelled to paint in Switzerland, France, Spain and Norway. The Academy made him an academician in 1880. Teaching posts later took him to Belgorod and back to Saint Petersburg, and from there he often travelled to Latvia to paint. He died in 1909 in Nizhyn, in present-day Ukraine.