Painting "Landscape with a mountain"

Description

Josefina Holmlund was born in Stockholm in 1827.  Her parents were Nils Holmlund and Johanna Helena Holmlund (née Torsslow) and she had one sister, Jeanette.  Josefina trained as a painter and studied under Teodor Billing, a former student of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm who was a realist landscape painter and who depicted many scenes from Skåne, Lapland and Värmland.  Her other tutor in those early days was Olof Hermelin, who was an ardent advocate for national Swedish values and became a prominent portrayer of the domestic landscape mainly in Uppland and Södermanland.

In the 1850’s, Josefina attended the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Stockholm where one of her professors was Edvard Bergh who started his career in law but later studied at the Royal Academy in Stockholm.  He founded the landscaping school at the Royal Academy and this school was characterized by the Swedish landscape painting of the time.  The fact that Josefina studied art at the Academy is unusual as the establishment did not officially allow entry for women before 1864.

In 1863, aged thirty-six, she travelled to Dusseldorf and went to live with her sister Jeanette.  Jeanette Holmlund who was also a painter had married the Norwegian landscape painter Nils Björnsson Möller.  Whilst living with them Josefina became influenced by her brother-in-law’s art.  She continued with her artistic studies and became strongly influenced by the “Dusseldorf School of painting”, which referred to a group of painters who either taught or studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in the 1830s and 1840s, when the Academy was directed by the German Romantic painter Wilhelm von Schadow. The work of the Düsseldorf School is typified by finely meticulous yet imaginary landscapes.  Such landscapes often had religious or allegorical stories set in the landscapes. Members of the Düsseldorf School were great believers in plein air painting, and tended to use a palette with relatively subdued and even colours. that was a national romantic emphasis that depicted dramatic nature scenes, waterfalls and rapids with rocks.

The Düsseldorf School emerged as part of the German Romantic movement.  Depictions by these artists had a national romantic emphasis that depicted dramatic nature scenes, waterfalls and rapids with rocks.

She went on to make many trips to Holland, Norway and Scandinavia and the breath-taking countryside she discovered during her many journeys featured in her landscape works.

Josefina Holmlund never married and died in 1905, aged 78.

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