Hans Gude

Hans Gude painted Norway’s fjords, mountains and coasts, first in a grand Romantic style and later with a fresher, more realistic eye for weather, water and light. He was one of the most important Norwegian landscape painters of the nineteenth century.

He was born in Christiania (Oslo) in 1825 and trained at the Düsseldorf Academy under Andreas Achenbach and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. He went on to teach landscape painting in Düsseldorf, Karlsruhe and Berlin for almost fifty years, training generations of Scandinavian artists. He died in Berlin in 1903.

Bridal Procession on the Hardanger Fjord (1848), painted with Adolph Tidemand, who did the figures, is one of the best loved pictures in Norway and hangs in the National Museum in Oslo.