On a tired Saturday afternoon in early-mid April, I randomly found myself reading Wikipedia articles about stuff from the 19th century. Initially, these were articles about old American writers and the “gift book” trend of the time, but then I stumbled across the article about Romantic art… and this Norwegian painting from 1847 instantly caught my attention:
(Click for larger image) “Vinterettermiddag” (Winter Afternoon) by Hans Gude (1847) Image via Wikimedia Commons .
Whilst this painting by Hans Gude (1825-1903) is technically just a timeless mountain landscape, the palette makes it look like something from the 20th or 21st century. Whilst it’s very likely that it was painted – or at least sketched – from life, the main thing here is the faintly purple tinge that Gude added to the snow. It’s a twist on the classic blue/orange palette (which he used in this other painting), which actually looks better than it. It’s also evocative of the 1970s or the 1990s, or even some parts of this set of fan-made “Doom II” levels from 2016. It certainly looks a lot more modern than 1847.
Again, the purple is fairly subtle in this painting but the choice to use a bold two-colour palette instantly makes this painting stand out against even the long list of more drab and realistic landscapes by Gude himself. Whilst some of those paintings look surprisingly photo-realistic in a way which almost seems like looking at HD video footage from 170+ years ago, a lot of them have the typical blue/green/brown/grey palette that you’d associate with old landscape paintings.
But this one painting is different. Again, I think that one thing which makes it interesting is the purple paint. Whilst a basic purple can obviously be made by mixing red and blue paint, the colour was historically fairly rare in many other contexts. Purple clothes used to be ridiculously expensive – due to using Tyrian purple dye – until a much cheaper synthetic purple dye was invented in 1856, nine years after Hans Gude finished making “Vinterettermiddag” (1847). Again, paints and fabric dyes are different and other paintings from before 1856 also use purple too.
Still, it’s unusual to see it used in combination with orange in such an old painting. It really does make this painting look ahead of it’s time. Almost like something you’d expect to see on the cover of a symphonic metal album from the 1990s or early 2000s, or possibly a fantasy genre novel cover from the 1960s-80s. Not only that, Gude also makes the landscape look more interesting with some basic visual storytelling – two people skiing towards a house. And, not only does the glowing red/orange doorway of the house stand out perfectly against the dark wood and cool-toned snow around it, but glowing red doors are also very reminiscent of 1970s-80s horror movies, such as Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” (1977) too.
I know it’s a fairly basic thing, and I was pretty tired when I wrote this short article, but this painting was attention-grabbing in a way that paintings from the mid-19th century rarely are. Yes, Hans Gude wasn’t the first painter to use a dramatic colour scheme and, again, the scene possibly even just looked like this in real life – but it’s just weird to see a purple/orange palette being used in a painting from this long ago. It really feels like it was something ahead of its time.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
