You won’t have heard of Peder Balke. Yet this long-neglected painter from 19th-century Norway is now the subject of a solo show at the National Gallery. And it’s an absolute revelation. Walking around, I marvelled at the intensity of a man obsessed with revealing the frozen grandeur and elemental drama dominating his country’s northernmost shores. Like Turner, he was driven by a restless urge to travel, discovering landscapes that enlarged and transformed his vision of the world.
In 1832 he took an arduous sea journey to the far north of Norway, ceaselessly sketching the rugged coast and mountains along the way. His excitement grew as he passed the primal North Cape, and the onset of a hurricane only increased Balke’s avid involvement. On reaching the shore, where he held on tight to a cliff for safety, he was enthralled by the spectacle of the heaving sea hurling itself against rocks. According to his memoir, he never forgot ‘the magnificent sight that manifested itself to my scrutinising gaze’.
The extreme cold must have been daunting, and the National Gallery’s show confronts me immediately with a large, chilling painting of North Cape, where everything — sea, boats, sky and distant mountainous coast — seems in danger of disappearing in an onslaught of snow and ice.
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