Oil painting, 'Coast Scene: Gulf of Lyons', Georg Emil Libert, Danish school, 1840s

Coast scene: a small bay with rowing boat in the froeground and distant ships vanishing in the mist, small cliffs on the righ hand side.

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, 1868

Historical significance: Although it seems that Libert essentially painted views of the Northern countryside, this painting is traditionally said to represent the Gulf of Lyons in Southern France. The compositional formula is however reminiscent of the 17th-century Dutch imagery which aroused a revived interest in 19th-century landscapists. The ship in the distance and nets in the foreground are recurrent features in the seascapes of such Dutch masters as Jan van Goyen or Jan van de Cappelle (ca.1624-1679).
This composition is almost similar to 1553-1869 which shows an identical bay with a small embarkation but variations in the background coast-line.This painting most liekly belongs to Libert's early career, when he was still under the influence of the masters he studied during his training years.
This painting was bequeathed by the Rev. Townshend who owned a large collection of 19th-century landscape and genre paintings.

The word Romanticism derived from the medieval term 'romance' and was first used by the German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel to label a wider cultural movement beginning with the late 18th and ending towards the mid 19th century. Romanticism started first in Western Europe as a literary and philosophical movement and only gradually involved the other arts, explicitly around 1800. Romantic artists were fascinated by nature they interpreted as a mirror of the mind. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious and the occult. The interest in the exotic and the non-Western, illustrated in France by such a painter as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), as well as the medieval revival, witnessed in England by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), are perhaps the most identifiable parts of Romanticism. It is really in the Post-Napoleonic period that this movement gained ascendancy. Its greatest proponents were among others Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) and François-René de Chateaubriant (1768-1848) in France, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) in England, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in Germany. In the visual arts, it was largely played out by 1850, but in music it persists for another generation.

Georg Emil Libert (1820-1908) was born in Copenhagen. He was in Munich in 1846-47 and travelled in Southern Germany and Austria in 1851, 1857 and 1875. He exhibited in Vienna in 1873.

This painting is a fine example of the Romantic imagery which developed in Northern Europe in the 19th century and favoured harmonious landscape characterised by a high degree of finish and clear tones. The present painting is traditionally said to show a view of the gulf of Lyons. This type of compositions was quite popular and attracted the collectors interest during the second half of the century.

1633-1869