Scandinavia

Scandinavia occupies a distinctive place in the European imagination — a region of extreme landscapes, ancient Viking heritage and distinctive cultural traditions that attracted the attention of travellers, artists and scholars from the seventeenth century onwards. The antique prints depicting Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland reflect the full range of European engagement with the Nordic world, from the topographical views of Danish and Swedish cities that appear in the great atlas publications of the seventeenth century to the Romantic landscape imagery that made the Norwegian fjords one of the defining subjects of nineteenth-century picturesque travel.

The city views of the Scandinavian capitals — Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo (then Christiania) and Helsinki — appear in the major European atlas and city view publications from the sixteenth century onwards. Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum included views of Copenhagen and other Scandinavian cities, and the subsequent Dutch and German atlas publishers continued this tradition, documenting the development of the Nordic capitals with varying degrees of accuracy and considerable decorative quality. Copenhagen, as the seat of the Danish crown and the dominant commercial city of the Baltic world through the seventeenth century, received particular attention, and the prints documenting its harbour, its fortifications and its distinctive urban character are among the most historically significant in the Scandinavian illustrative tradition.

Norway’s spectacular landscape — the fjords, the mountains, the northern coast with its midnight sun and winter darkness — attracted artists and travellers from the late eighteenth century, when the Romantic movement’s celebration of sublime and dramatic natural scenery made the Norwegian landscape one of the most desirable subjects in European landscape art. The paintings of Johan Christian Dahl and the subsequent tradition of Norwegian landscape painting that he inspired were widely engraved and distributed, bringing the visual character of Norwegian nature to a European audience that was increasingly drawn to the north as an alternative to the more familiar landscapes of the Alpine and Mediterranean travel tradition.

Swedish industrial and scientific imagery forms a distinct strand of Scandinavian illustration. Sweden’s extraordinary mineral wealth — the iron ore of Lapland, the copper of Falun, the silver of the central Swedish mining districts — generated a tradition of mining and industrial illustration that documents the extractive industries on which Swedish prosperity depended through much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Falun copper mine, one of the great industrial sites of the early modern world, was depicted in prints that document both its physical character and its role in the commercial world of the Baltic.

The Viking heritage of Scandinavia attracted increasing scholarly and popular attention through the nineteenth century, as the Romantic movement’s interest in national origins and medieval history focused attention on the runic inscriptions, ship burials and saga literature that constituted the primary evidence for Norse civilisation. The illustrated publications of Scandinavian antiquarians and historians brought Viking imagery to a wide European audience, and the influence of this imagery on the broader Romantic visual tradition was considerable.

For collectors of European topographical art, the history of exploration or the visual culture of the Romantic movement, antique prints of Scandinavia offer material of distinctive character and consistent interest. The combination of dramatic landscape, ancient history, maritime tradition and distinctive cultural identity gives Scandinavian illustration an appeal that extends well beyond regional or specialist interest.