Church-Goers Arriving by Boat at the Parish Church of Leksand on Siljan Lake, Sweden
Wilhelm Marstrand, 1853
This large genre scene shows parishioners from Leksand, in the Swedish province of Dalarna, arriving by boat at the parish church on the shore of Lake Siljan on a Sunday morning. Marstrand painted it after a honeymoon that could not take him south because of the First Schleswig War. On the recommendation of his friend Hans Christian Andersen, who had described the colourful procession of churchgoers in a travel book, the couple went to Sweden instead. Marstrand returned to Lake Siljan in 1851 and made numerous preparatory sketches in Leksand, and the picture was finished in early 1853, in time for the spring exhibition at Charlottenborg. What sets the work apart is its restraint: Marstrand gives up the anecdote, the caricature and the idealisation that marked many of his earlier scenes of everyday life. He arranges a panoramic, tightly organised composition in which the crowd resembles a battle scene more than an ordinary rural gathering, which makes it one of the high points of his output.
- Painter
- Wilhelm Marstrand
- Date
- 1853
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 130 × 215 cm
- Museum
- Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen Municipality
- Genre
- genre art
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