Kruskopf’s landscapes foreshadowed the birth of a larger travel account, Finland framställdt i teckningar (Finland Illustrated in Drawings, 1845–52), which combines both the antiquarian and topographic, as well as the pic-turesque approach. Several artists provided pictures of landscapes, includ-ing Pehr Adolf Kruskopf and Magnus von Wright. It was published by C. A.
Öhman, and he employed Zacharias Topelius to write the accompanying texts.417 Finland framställdt i teckningar had a great significance for the de-piction of Finnish landscapes in the nationalist spirit of the time. It consti-tuted a model which was followed till the turn of the century.418 Moreover, it was the first more comprehensive work to be made following Swedish examples.419 By representing different regions in Finland from a histori-cal420 and topographical point of view, its purpose was to introduce the sights of Finland to the new rulers in St. Petersburg in a most positive way.
It was also published in French and German, but as such it was aimed at a limited audience consisting of the patriotic and educated elite.421 What is important from the perspective of this study, the purpose of the work for Topelius himself was to give a wide and scientifically extensive description of Finland and its people.422 Interestingly, he included some natural scapes from Lapland, although most of the views present cultural land-scapes from southern Finland. The natural landland-scapes, actually, were seen as the common property of all Finns.423 The emphasis of the travel account, however, lies in the representation of Finnish history in the light of the mo-tifs chosen and texts. This is clearly indicated by the fact that only twenty pictures out of 120 represent places that were famous for being attractive, or beautiful as natural sights.424 And yet, for this study, it is of special in-terest that Finland framställdt i teckningar had an impact on how Topelius developed as a geographer, because it was actually here that he started to pay attention to geographical phenomena.425 This will be discussed fur-ther in chapter 4 in relation to Finnish landscapes. Topelius also published other books which dealt with landscape and had a great impact on the image of Finland: Naturens bok (Nature’s Book, 1856), En resa i Finland (Trav
elling in Finland, 1873) and Boken om Vårt land (A Book about Our Country, 1875). In addition, he was one of the publishers of Suomi 19:llä vuosisadalla (Finland in the 19th century, 1893) which was aimed at foreigners and for which he wrote a poetic preface, as well as the first two chapters.
417 Topelius composed most of them, notwithstanding the chapter about Karelia, which was written by H. A.
Rein holm (1819–83), a priest and col-lector of Finnish folklore. For the au-thorship of Finland Illustrated in Draw
ings, see Grandell 2011, XIV−XVII; Tiitta 1994, 75–79.
418 Häyrynen 2005, 41.
419 Sverige framstäldt i teckningar by a Finnish-born priest and author G. H.
Mellin, was published 1836–40. The difference between these two is that there is no ethnographic material in Topelius’s book. Another influential work, especially for the pictures, was Ulrik Thesner’s Fordna och närvarande Sverige (1817–65). Tiitta 1994, 76; See also Knapas 2011, XIII; Grandell 2011, XIV; Hirn 1988, 59–62.
420 Historical refers here mainly to the time when Finland was under Swed-ish rule.
If we analyse the illustrations in travelogues from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we can note that the formulae of the sublime and the picturesque are used to a great extent. This is apparent especially in the depiction of the mountains and trees. On the one hand, the shape of the mountains, or boulders, is very often rounded. Even the most rugged mountain sides do not always look sharp-edged, but rather seem to ‘bend’ like trees in the wind, and therefore they produce certain kind of softness. On the other hand, they can be depicted in a very con-tradictory way, and thus their tops are almost like the point of a pin, in other words too thin and sharp. Also the size of the mountain is often ex-aggerated to enhance the impression of its grandeur. This effect can also be emphasised by adding some staffage figures.426 As to the delineation of trees, the branches and leaves are depicted meticulously, giving the trees a round outer form and often a lace-like appearance, and yet the details are not clear enough to convey the species. Consequently, they are not specific representatives of their genera, but rather ideal examples of their kind. In the artworks of Düsseldorf landscape artists, by comparison, the different tree species are mostly quite easy to recognise, even in the sim-plest sketches consisting only of the outline of a tree, and the mountains seem to imitate their natural forms and size in relation to the surroundings, as described in chapter four,
The differences in approach described above can also be ex-plained by the way in which people behave when encountering some-thing new. When travelling to a new country, even to a new continent, we carry our imaginings and expectations with us, based on our earlier life.
Therefore, in the face of something new, or something we have not seen before, we try to make it fit with our earlier experiences and knowledge.
Correspondingly, artists making illustrations for travelogues, or working on expeditions, depicted nature in new regions using the old conventional formulae with which they were familiar. A good example of this kind of ap-proach is provided by the pictures depicting Australia, as stated by Haila, who describes how the early European illustrators made the Australian landscape look European.427 The early British settlers found this new world strange and bewildering, but in their artworks they rather focused on ren-dering the views of the developing colonial settlement than the disturbing landscape around it.428 It was only later in the 1850s that the Austrian artist Eugène von Guérard (1811–1901) depicted Australian nature ‘as it is’, that
426 For the purpose of staffage figures, see also Baumgärtel 1995, 24.
427 Here Haila compares John Glover’s drawing Brady’s Lookout, Tasmania with Eugène von Guérard’s draw-ing Stone Rises near the Pirron Yallock Creek. Haila 2004, 59–61.
428 Apart from the settlement, the artists focused on native animals, birdlife, reptiles, fish and plants. Radford 2013, 92.
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is to say as he perceived it, making his landscapes look Australian.429 Von Guérard’s approach can be explained by the fact that he had studied in Düsseldorf under Schirmer, and followed the principles of the local natu-ralism of the time, which will be discussed more closely in chapter four.430 Generally speaking, a more naturalistic depiction of scenery started to emerge, and the differences between landscape painting and topographical painting became less distinctive at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The latter tended to depict either wide panoramas, which stressed the impression of distance and remoteness to the land-scape, or minute and meticulous focus on the foreground. This was also a time of great exploration, and scientific travel descriptions struggled to find an innocent mode of literary and visual expression.431 As discussed earlier, the voyagers were not narrowly specialised, and for them art and science were not separate. Therefore, art could also serve a practical pur-pose, for instance when depicting exotic plants or landscapes – as in the case of Humboldt. This was due to the fact that empiricism challenged the traditional rationalist way of thinking and its stress on a priori knowledge.
For this reason, not only the sciences but also the arts participated in shap-ing the world. Stafford combines the explorer’s method of perception with empiricism, and she talks about a specifically scientific way of seeing, or a ‘scientific gaze’, which she distinguishes from other eighteenth-century visual modes. According to this method, ‘the scientific observer looks at that which he explores’, and ‘the scientific gaze entails a purposive curios-ity’.432 When writing about their experiences, the explorers tried to explain what they had seen in a comprehensible way and here the illustrations were helpful. It is to be noted, too, that this was the time when the study of natural history became popular.
On the whole, illustrated travel accounts belong to a wider con-cept of landscape imagery which, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, not only concerns concrete objects, such as pictures, maps, spectacles, poems, but also more abstract things, such as dreams and ideas. Following Mitchell’s notion, we do not concentrate on paintings and pictures alone, but in-clude a large variety of images and descriptions of the landscape, the sub-jects of landscape, and physical places, as well as scientific presentations and school books.433 In the nineteenth century, along with the illustrated travel accounts, large-scale paintings in the form of panoramas, dioramas and neoramas, as well as photographs, conveyed information about more
429 For von Guérard’s Australian land-scapes, see Nature Revealed (2011). He travelled widely in Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, New South Wales and New Zealand, making sketches.
430 In comparison, Radford describes this change from the British Romantic watercolour tradition to a German Romantic in oils. Radford 2013, 98.
431 Stafford points out how geologists’, mineralogists’ and botanists’ ideas about Earth widened artists’ scope of the landscape. Stafford 1984, 17, 28.
432 In the discussion of the birth of sci-entific language, Stafford emphasises the influence of empiricism and the rise of naturalism. All of these con-tributed to the development of a ‘sci-entific gaze’, which was based on the ability to see as a means of acquiring knowledge. Stafford 1984, 40, 52.
433 Mitchell 1986, 9−12; Häyrynen 2005, 59.
distant places. According to Humboldt, they served as ‘a substitute for trav-elling through different regions’, and he found the panoramas especially useful, as the spectator could be surrounded by a foreign scene free from the ‘disturbing influences of reality’. Humboldt also noted the introduction of Prevost and Daguerre photographs, and to his mind, these could be of particular assistance when depicting colossal tree trunks. For Humboldt, the task of all these methods was to raise the ‘feeling of admiration for nature’.434 After all, we have to remember to make a distinction between landscape imagery and landscape paintings as emphasised by the Finnish scholar Maunu Häyrynen. Therefore, a landscape painting is art compris-ing many meancompris-ings, although it can be used, for example, for commercial purposes, whereas landscape imagery in popular usage does not have the same origin, but rather serves as a means for giving new connotations to artworks.435 Later, the expansion of popular landscape imagery was really sparked by the introduction of photography. It was new technology that some of the artists working in Düsseldorf are known to have used, but as photography was still very time-consuming, artists there mainly kept to traditional methods in their landscape painting, as we shall see in the next chapter.
434 Humboldt 1852, 98.
435 Häyrynen 2005, 67.
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436 For example, the walls of the Minoan houses in Akrotiri (Santorini today), or of the Roman villas in Rome and Pompeii were decorated with mural paintings depicting landscapes. Later, imagina-tive landscapes provided the background to sev-eral religious Medieval and Renaissance paint-ings and portraits. Ludwig Trepl claims that there were no landscape paintings, Landschaftsgemäl
de, nor descriptions of landscapes in Antiquity, or the Middle Ages, but only depictions of plants and animals. I assume that by Landschaftsgemäl
de, he means a painting on canvas, and therefore he does not refer to mural paintings. Trepl 2012, 37.
437 The drawings of the dunes near Harlem from around 1603 by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) are regarded as the first ‘realistic’ Dutch landscape images. However, there had been surveyors, mappers and artists before him who had com-posed landscapes for descriptive purposes. Golt-zius’s pictures indicate a change from a mapping mode into landscape representation. Alpers 1983, 139.
Landscape painting as a specific genre of visual arts is considered to have been established particularly in the early seventeenth-century Netherlands and Italy, but there are older traditions of pictorial representation of landscapes.436 The seventeenth-century classical ideal landscape of Italian art and the realistic landscape of Dutch art were the two main sources for northern and European landscape painting at the turn of both the eight-eenth and nineteight-eenth centuries.437 Dutch landscape art was especially highly appreciated both in Dresden and Düsseldorf, and Old Masters such as Salomon and Jacob van Ruysdael, as well as Meindert Hobbema, were greatly admired. Furthermore, landscape painting in Germany, Britain and France underwent a significant revival at that time which can be accredited to a new relationship with nature as a result of the Enlightenment and to the development of the natural sciences. Consequently, a new approach and new motifs were introduced. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was also a remarkable expansion in the appreciation of landscape art due to social and economic factors – in the case of Düsseldorf, the wealthy bourgeoisie
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started to decorate their homes with landscapes.438 As such, Düsseldorf and its art education belong to a long line of tradition, and it played an important role in the development of Finnish landscape painting in the nineteenth century.439 In this sense, Düsseldorf belonged to the centre, whereas Finland and its art education represented the periphery.