Four Still-lifes by Theude Grønland

Poppies, Tulips, and Roses in a Vase, 1846. (Detail.)

Theude Grønland (31 August 1817, Altona - 16 April 1876, Berlin), Danish painter, best know for his floral paintings. The son of an organist, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1837 to 1839. He exhibited a few portraits before deciding to focus his career on flower and fruit painting. After a year traveling abroad, he settled in Paris in 1844, where he went on to win medals at the Salon and at the Paris World Exhibition of 1855. He provided designs for French tapestry makers, and his work was also very popular in Britain. Grønland moved to Berlin in 1869 and lived there until his death seven years later.

Poppies, Tulips, and Roses in a Vase, 1846.

Grønland is yet another Danish artist, previously unknown to me, who I just happened to stumble across on the internet while I was looking for something else. And the examples of his work here exemplify - to terribly "sensitive" me, anyway - the improbable linking of visual exactitude with the lyrical/emotional/spiritual. Specifically, the frisson experienced in the viewing of work whose remarkable verisimilitude could never have been intended to elicit much more of a response than appreciation of the artist's great skill, but yet whose rigorously realized, explicitly representational precision most certainly expresses the poetic.

Grapes on a Vine, 1861.

Flowers with Antique Vase, 1845.

Still Life of a Duck, 1849.