Amaldus Nielsen
Amaldus Nielsen was a Norwegian artist who lived from 1838 to 1932. He was associated with the Naturalist art movement and is often recognized as the first naturalist painter in Norway.
Nielsen was born in Halse in southern Norway to a middle-class family. He had an early inclination towards art and painted the landscapes around his home. With the financial help of a traveling art teacher, at 16 years old, Nielsen was able to pursue his artistic studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. Nielsen attended the Academy of Art in Copenhagen in 1855, where he did not do very well. After one year, he left Copenhagen to continue his art studies at the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany. After completing his studies, Nielsen moved back to Norway to pursue his art. He repeatedly sold his artworks at the prominent Christiania Kunstforening art auctions, which provided him with steady work and financial stability. This output of work was necessary to support his wife and 11 children.
Nielsen was part of the Naturalist art movement that had become an increasingly prominent art movement since the mid nineteenth century. Nielsen had said that nature was his teacher and greatest source of inspiration. Though he was formally taught during the height of German Romanticism, he stayed true to his naturalist tendencies. Beginning in the 1860s, Nielsen sketched his studies outdoors, en plein air. This allowed him to pay close attention to the light and atmospheric qualities of the landscapes he was painting. Most of Nielsen’s landscapes depicted areas in southern and western Norway, around his home. He would walk for miles to destinations when the light was just right to paint it in all its natural glory.
Amaldus Nielsen did very well in his lifetime. In 1890, he was knighted as the First Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav. He painted for the rest of his long life. At the age of 94, he passed away after suffering from pneumonia.
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