Oil painting on canvas, 'Frost Scene: The Setting Sun', Georg Emil Libert, Danish school, 1847

In the foreground and disappearing into the distance is a frozen stretch of water. To the left and right are shallow, snow-covered, banks with various rocks and felled tree trunks scattered on them. In the centre midground are two tiny figures, one kneeling, the other standing, on the ice. To their right is a single tree trunk bereft of branches or leaves with what looks like a large snow-covered bird's nest perched on the top. To the right of this is a boat and further to the right still is a wooden building with smoke coming from the chimney. Further in the distance can be seen three windmills and then at the furthest point a skyline of spires. The orange glow of the setting sun radiates through a cloudy sky.

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, 1868

Historical significance: This painting is a typical example of stormy landscape paintings favoured by the Scandinavian artists under the influence of the German David Caspar Friedrich (1774-1840) and his pupil the Norwegian Johann Christian Dahl (1788-1857), with whom Libert may have been in contact when he came to Munich in 1845-46.
The high degree of finish and clear tones along with an interest in atmospheric effects such as the sunrise light are characteristic of the Romantic movement. The Romantic artists focused on the fragility of humankind against the omnipotent nature, which is here well illustrated by the small figures standing on the frozen river under a wide atmospheric sky.
Libert's oeuvre is very little represented in the UK and the V&A may be the only public institution to own the most comprehensive group of his works. 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 mysterious landscape characterised by a high degree of finish as well as clear and cool tonality. It focuses here on the contrast between the frozen scenery and the incandescent setting sun in the horizon. This atmospheric effect sublimated into dramatic scenery is typical of the Romantic movement. Dated 1847, this composition was made shortly after Libert went to Munich where sojourned a group of Romantic painters under the influence of Caspar David Friedrich. This type of compositions was quite popular and attracted the collectors’ interest during the second half of the century.

1577-1869