page_title: Dankvart Dreyer
section_title: Adversity and withdrawal
hierarchical_section_title: Dankvart Dreyer / Adversity and withdrawal
context_page_description: Dankvart Dreyer was a Danish landscape painter of the Copenhagen School of painters who was educated under the guidance of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. Around 1840, he was part of the emerging National Romantic landscape painting scene in Denmark but as a result of his over-dramatic and excessively natural style, he did not fit the aesthetics and the ideology of the period. After being widely criticized, he turned his back on the artistic establishment and passed into near oblivion. In 1852, when only 36 years old, he died from typhus.
  Posthumously, half a century after his death, his reputation was restored, prompted by the art historian Karl Madsen, and today he is considered to be one of the leading Danish landscape painters of his day, the peer of his more famous contemporaries P. C. Skovgaard and Johan Lundbye.
context_section_description: However, as time progressed, Dreyer increasingly turned his back on what was considered good taste by Copenhagen's artistic establishment. Symptomatically, Lundbye and Skovgaard often attended Grundtvig's sermons while Dreyer preferred to read Blicher. It was not enough just to paint the Danish landscape in order to satisfy the aesthetics and ideology of the time. Good painting, it was believed, should not merely document the scenery at a specific locale. It was supposed to be a carefully composed representation of an idealized picture of the nation and the national character.
  The physicist Hans Christian Ørsted had launched the theory that people reflected the landscape they lived in. The Danish national character, he maintained, was calm and proud because the Danish landscape was so undramatic and the climate so mild. Dreyer could not, or would not, meet these demands. Painting the browning moorlands and not just the rolling, green hills of eastern Denmark, he was judged to be painting the wrong Denmark. He also presented a rougher, less sophisticated, image of the Danish countryside; one which was more dramatic and more natural. The critics reacted strongly against him. Dreyer, whose reserved and introvert nature had been observed by Jerichau during his childhood, stopped exhibiting at the annual Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition and increasingly withdrew from Copenhagen's art scene.
  In 1848, he moved back to Funen, settling in the little village near Assens where he had grown up. He never stopped painting but he made no further efforts to exhibit. In 1852, when only 36, he died of typhus.
caption: A glade in a forest, 1838.
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