Adolph Tidemand

Biography

The first picture by Tidemand that we know in oil was not about Norway. “Returning Fishermen on the Coast of Zealand” (1838) was painted in Düsseldorf, and a buyer was found at home: the art society in Christiania bought the canvas on the initiative of Thomas Fearnley and others.

He was born on 14 August 1814 in Mandal, the son of Christen Tidemand, a customs inspector who was also a member of the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. His mother, Johanne Henriette Haste, was born in Copenhagen. A private teacher in his home town gave him his first drawing lessons, and his ability was noticed early. The usual route through the drawing school in Christiania he did not take, according to some accounts because of family connections; according to others he did study there briefly. In 1832 he left for Copenhagen. The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at first turned him down, and he studied at a private drawing school, but from 1833 he was a pupil of the Academy. At its exhibitions in 1835 and 1836 he received distinctions.

In 1837 Tidemand moved to Düsseldorf, then one of the most popular art schools in Europe. He had meant to travel on to Italy but stayed, because he liked the city. He studied there until 1841, and Theodor Hildebrandt is named among his teachers. The painting “Gustav Vasa Addressing the Dalecarlians in Mora Church” (1841) was bought by a German art society; it was later shown in Christiania and drew a great response. In the autumn of 1841 he went to Italy with his brother Emil; little survives from the trip, for example “Neapolitan Fisherman” (1842).

The real turning point came in 1842–1845. He travelled through Østerdalen, Gudbrandsdalen, Sogn, Hardanger and Telemark, drawing people, their clothes, utensils and houses, and writing down legends and folk tales. In 1843, in Hardanger, he met the eighteen-year-old Hans Gude. The friendship grew into joint work: Gude painted the landscape, Tidemand the figures.

In 1845 he married his childhood sweetheart Claudine Marie Bergitte Jæger, and they settled in Düsseldorf. From there he travelled to Norway for studies and painted the pictures in the studio. His last journey took place in 1874–1875 (sources give different years).

His best-known works date from the late 1840s and the 1850s: “The Bridal Procession in Hardanger” (1848, with Gude), “The Haugeans” (1848, repeated in 1852), “Divine Service in a Norwegian Country Church” (1845), “Funeral Procession on the Sognefjord” (1853, also with Gude) and “The Wounded Bear Hunter” (1856). In March 1849 “The Bridal Procession” was shown as a tableau vivant at an evening of the Artists’ Society in the theatre in Christiania, accompanied by a choir to words by Andreas Munch and music by Halfdan Kjerulf. King Oscar I commissioned the series “Peasant Life” for the palace of Oscarshall near Christiania in 1848, or in 1852 according to other accounts. Tidemand painted peasants with dignity, often in their festive clothes. For that he is reproached with idealising them, although this was a common device in Norwegian national romanticism. He also painted the altar of the Trinity Church in Christiania.

Honours followed one after another: the Order of St Olav in 1849, the French Legion of Honour in 1855, the Swedish Order of the Polar Star in 1866. In 1867 he took part in the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and from 1869 he was an honorary professor at the Düsseldorf Academy.

He collected his studies of costume, about 150 drawings and oil paintings, for almost thirty years, from 1843 to 1874. It seems to me that for future historians of everyday life they are worth more than some of the large canvases.

In 1874 his only son, Adolph, died at twenty-eight. Tidemand himself died on 25 August 1876 in Christiania. The collection, including sketchbooks, drawings, watercolours and oil paintings, came to the museum by bequest in 1882. His nephew Adolph Claudius Tidemand also became a painter, and in the early twentieth century his pictures were sold as works by his uncle.