What Norwegian painting might have become in the
hands of the group of talented youth who came to the fore
in those days if they had followed the path indicated by
Dahl--to Denmark and thereafter to France, where art life
was in healthy and luxurious flower--instead of going by
way of Düsseldorf, is a subject for dreaming and specula-
tion. How Tidemand's lyric vein might have developed
and how his characterization of humanity might have been
deepened through artistic impressions in the land of Dela-
croix and Millet! How Gude's mild and equable sense
of the beauty of nature and Cappelen's great talents as a
nature poet might imaginably have been clothed in other
picturesque shapes if, instead of graduating from the Acad-
emy in Düsseldorf, they had been privileged to come in
contact with the masters of landscape in Fontainebleau and
to acquaint themselves with the spiritual art of Corot! How
the original and earthy strength of the Norse endowment
might conceivably have broken a new path for itself if it
had come under the sway of the brutal peasant genius of
Courbet instead of the influence of the Düsseldorf practice
of art for the sake of art dealers! Concerning these and
other possibilities one may dream and dispute.

The indisputable fact remains, however, that Norwegian
painting was left a remote stranger to the greatest thing
that happened in the history of art in the nineteenth century
--the burgeoning of French painting in the romanticism of
Delacroix and its bursting forth into naturalism. This it
was reserved for a new generation to see--in part: the
generation of the seventies. Therefore, too, they gave their
entire energy to the breaking down of those German barriers
with which our art and the artistic perceptions of our
public had been walled in. Yet even if the foreign influ-
ence which from this time forth becomes predominant was
not the most fortunate, the period of the forties and fifties
stands out as a kind of golden age in Norwegian art,
richly endowed as it was with talent, and great as was the
national contribution in the universal struggle toward a
larger culture.

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