View of the River Elbe in Dresden with the Augustus Bridge

Thomas Fearnley

1802 Fredrikshald – 1842 Munich

Oil on paper. Size of sheet: 10.5 x 16.3 cm. Old inscription on the mount: fearnley.

Provenance: Bought from Bloomquist by the father of the previous owner in the mid 1960s. Private collection, Oslo, 2006. Art market, Oslo.

In 1829, Fearnley followed the invitation of his friend, the artist Johann Christian Dahl, who had lived in Dresden in the same house as Caspar David Friedrich since 1823. In Dresden, Fearnley frequented the same artistic circle as Friedrich and produced a number of small-scale, plein-air sketches of the city and its immediate surroundings. The Augustus Bridge across the River Elbe was a popular motif amongst the Dresden Romantics and Fearnley also returned to the subject matter on several occasions (1). Fearnley remained in Dresden until June 1830 before travelling on to Prague.

Our oil sketch can be dated with relative ease. It must have been painted in February or March 1830, when the River Elbe was flooded, carrying the melted snow from the Ore mountains.

“Along with J.C. Dahl, Fearnley was the most significant and most richly gifted painter in the decades after 1814. They were both to an eminent degree painterly talents, keen in their use of colour's effects and material possibilities of expression, and of a picture's ability to characterise a landscape and describe an experience of nature. Fearnley was, to a higher degree than Dahl a European artist” (...) and he “aimed at something other than immediate impressions of nature; he wanted to give all the large interpretations of nature an idealistic art that would surpass Dahl's “way of nature”(2).

(1) A further version can be found in the National Gallery, Oslo (Augustus Bridge in Dresden, oil on paper, laid down on cardboard, 14 x 20.5 cm, NG. 2218). Also a large-format pencil drawing of the View of the Elbe bend above Augustus Bridge, (Fearnley A-3389). Formerly on the Oslo art market (2001, oil on paper, laid down on cardboard, 9 x 13. cm).
(2) Translated from Norsk Kunstnerleksikon, 1982, vol. 1, p. 626.

Bought by a private collector, Northern America.