Carmiencke - Western Landscape Bear Cushion

Artist: Johann Hermann Carmiencke. Western Landscape. Oil painting. 1853. Dramatic painting of a bear dwarfed by a vast rocky landscape with a river stretching into the distance. Johann Hermann Carmiencke was a landscape painter and etcher born in Hamburg, Germany. He studied under Johan Christian Dahl, one of the first great romantic painters of Norway, and continued his schooling throughout the 1830's in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Leipzig, Germany. As an artist, he travelled through Sweden, Bavaria, parts of the Austrian Empire, and Italy, and served as the court painter to King Christian VIII of Denmark following appointment to that position in 1846. Carmiencke ultimately relocated with his family to Brooklyn, New York, USA, where his dark, rustic style gained him a reputation among the romantic landscape painters of the Hudson River School. He passed away in 1867.