From the Inlet of Oslo

By the time he painted this picture, Hans Gude had become a professor of landscape painting at the Großherzoglich Badischen Kunstschule in Karlsruhe. After leaving Düsseldorf he spent a couple of years in Wales, where the mild climate was conducive to open-air painting. Depicting clouds and atmospheric effects became Gude’s speciality, as did the reflection of sunlight on water. In the 1840s and 1850s he mainly painted highland landscapes, before progressing to coastal imagery; these preferences were perhaps motivated by his summertime visits to his parents in Norway, who in the 1850s relocated from the mountainous region of Hallingdal to the coastal village of Sand near Lillesand. More important, however, was probably the increasing popularity of maritime painting among the general public. The pathos of the highlands was supplanted by spectacular images of coastlines and breakers, but also the more harmonious scenes of majestic seacraft in the waters of Eastern Norway became popular.