With the exception of Edvard Munch, the art of the great Scandinavian painters at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century – such as Vilhelm Hammershoi , Peder Krøyer, Akseli Gallen-Kallela - are less well known by academics, collectors and the public at large outside Scandinavia than are their French Impressionist and Post Impressionist counterparts. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, there is a widespread misconception that artists from the Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland) simply adopted the innovations of their French counter-parts after they had spent time working and exhibiting in France, as many artists did during the 1880s. In fact these meetings led to important cross-fertilisations of ideas and, furthermore, on their return home, Scandinavian artists profoundly adapted artistic developments they had seen to their own painterly concerns and cultural heritage. Indeed Scandinavian paintings often reflected the artists pride in their culture, nature and light. This has been for long misunderstood by many collectors from other cultures. Scandinavian art was also characterised by a real relationship and sense of involvement between spectator and subject. In much of the French art of the period – particularly that of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists - the viewer is held at a distance: in Scandinavian painting nature or the interior has a symbolism in which you, the viewer, are invited to partake. Finally, the Scandinavians understood, appreciated and were great collectors of these works. Thus, the most important works of the period have stayed in Scandinavia and have seldom been seen outside their own country. Similarly most books and writings on these artists have not been translated. Danish art of this period divides into two principal schools of painting. Firstly the so-called "Interior School" of Hammershøi , Carl Holsoe and Peter Ilsted (Hammershøi’s brother-in-law). These artists focussed on creating art out of the everyday spaces and objects that they saw around them, on drawing the viewer into these worlds and suggesting their higher significance. By simplifying the structure and avoiding expression these works have a psychological and spiritual intensity that can be related to the works of Munch and Gallen-Kallela. The second prominent Danish ‘school’ is that of the artists in Skagen where Krøyer and Michael and Anna Ancher worked. These wonderful paintings equally involve the viewer but take them into the clear light and natural beauty of Skagen. In the same way the great Swedish artist Anders Zorn just across the Ore Sund, will invite the viewer to partake in his naturalist of paintings that reject the bourgeois culture of Paris. The natural landscape dominates the painting of many of the other great Swedish artists such as Bruno Liljefors whose animal paintings typify the Swedish painting style in the same way that Prince Eugen, Richard Bergh, Gustav Ilsted, and Eugène Jansson celebrate the landscape with their differing degrees of symbolism . The greatest exponent of the symbolism of landscape in Nordic painting is of course, Munch. Although his influence was felt widely he did not work in isolation. Munch like the marvellous Harald Sohlberg, received instruction from Elif Peterssen and Erik Werenskiold and attended the Summer School of the grand and by then extremely successful artist Fritz Thaulow. The other great symbolist painter was the Finnish Gallen-Kallela but his subject was much more closely related to Finnish folk law and he has thus never received the recognition that Munch received. Similarly, the modernist paintings of Helen Schjerfbeck have only recently been accorded in their rightful place alongside Munch in the understanding of the importance of symbolism and expressionism in the art of this period.

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