Hans Gude

Biography

In 1841 the sixteen-year-old Gude arrived in Düsseldorf, and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, the professor of landscape painting, advised him to give up thoughts of painting and return to ordinary studies. The academy did not accept him. Andreas Achenbach, however, took an interest in him and gave him private lessons.

Gude was the son of a judge, Ove Gude, and Marie Elisabeth Brandt. He had studied drawing since childhood, first with Johannes Flintoe and then at the Royal School of Drawing in Christiania, which he attended from 1838. It was the poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven who suggested sending the boy to Düsseldorf. In the autumn of 1842 Gude was admitted to the academy after all, to Schirmer’s landscape class, and he made quick progress: in the report for the 1843–44 school year he is the only student described as “very talented”, and the report for his fourth year says that he paints Norwegian scenery “in a truthful and distinctive manner”. At first he struggled with figures, and in several pictures Adolph Tidemand painted the people for him. That is how “Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord” (1848) came about: the landscape is Gude’s, the figures Tidemand’s. The picture was commissioned for tableaux vivants at a theatre in Christiania, shown in 1849.

With Schirmer he drifted further and further apart. By his own account, Schirmer disapproved of a large mountain view from the Rondane because the rendering of nature was too exact, and advised grouping the mountains according to the Classical ideal; this Gude could not accept. He finished the course in 1846, then worked in Christiania, and from 1850 he lived in Düsseldorf again. That year he married Betsy Anker. In 1852 he won a gold medal at the Berlin exhibition.

In 1854, at twenty-nine, he was appointed professor of landscape painting in Schirmer’s place. It is said that the appointment was partly political: in a dispute between Rhineland and Prussian interests, a Norwegian looked like a neutral candidate. Before him the post had been refused by the brothers Andreas and Oswald Achenbach and by Carl Friedrich Lessing, who could not agree on pay. The salary turned out to be low, and in 1857 Gude handed in his resignation; in his memoirs he blamed the intrigues of two pupils. Leaving was not easy to arrange. He was, in any case, able to buy a house in Düsseldorf with what he earned from sales.

In Norway there was an argument over whether art produced at a German academy could be called Norwegian. Gude answered that the Norwegian Düsseldorfers copied no one, and that their native landscape showed in their work whether they wished it or not. “Høifjæld” (1857) is considered his main picture.

In the autumn of 1862 Gude went to Wales, to the Lledr Valley near Betws-y-Coed, where a colony of British plein-air painters lived. He rented a house above the river and painted an ancient Roman bridge. The British artists worked in front of their subject, while he was used to making studies outdoors and painting the pictures in the studio, and this changed his approach. His showings at the Royal Academy in London in 1863 and 1864 failed; he called them “useful but bitter medicine”. Tidemand and Frederik Collett came to visit, and together they travelled as far as Holyhead, where Gude saw his first real Atlantic storm. Later he wrote that in Wales he had freed himself from many studio maxims.

In December 1863 he was offered a post at the Baden School of Art in Karlsruhe, where once again he succeeded Schirmer. He hesitated: it seemed to him that he would be serving a country that might soon be at war with his homeland. He had no choice, since at home there was no art school. Norwegian students also moved from Düsseldorf to Karlsruhe: Frederik Collett, Kitty Kielland, Eilif Peterssen, Otto Sinding, Christian Krohg, Frits Thaulow. He took them to paint Chiemsee in the open air. His painting “Fra Chiemsee” was so well received in Vienna that the court museum bought it, and Gude was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He directed the school in 1866–1868 and 1869–1870; his methods met resistance, and as early as 1874 he visited Berlin in search of better conditions. The Grand Duke took offence.

In 1880 Gude moved to Berlin and until 1901 ran the master studio in landscape painting at the academy, becoming a member of its senate. Few Norwegians came there: young artists were drawn to Paris. He had between five and eight students in 1880 and two or three by 1890. In the summers he spent a few weeks on the Baltic coast, at Ahlbeck and on Rügen, and in Berlin he began to work more often in gouache and watercolour, to keep his work fresh. When a large exhibition of his work was held in Christiania in 1895, he suggested showing studies and drawings: “unfortunately, they are of greater artistic value.” I would agree: he hardly exhibited his watercolours, but fellow painters, Harriet Backer among them, admired them.

At the turn of the century he defended the academies against the secession movements together with Anton von Werner, and mocked “the so-called Symbolism”. After a disappointing exhibition in Christiania in 1902 he wrote to Johan Martin Nielssen that he understood the modernists, who want to “take the helm” alone.

Gude died in Berlin on 17 August 1903. He was the first to be buried in the new Honorary Grove at Vår Frelsers Cemetery in Christiania.