Large portrait miniature of a young lady sitting in the chair was executed in 1844 by good listed Nirwegian portrait and miniature painter Hans Johan Frederik Berg ( 1813– 1874). He worked extensively as a portrait and miniature painter and with watercolours, also as a copyist. H. J. F. Berg was born in the trading town of Kopardal on Løkta in present-day Dønna municipality, where his father Anders Berg was a merchant. Mother Susanne Meldal Berhof died early, but her father married a daughter of Bishop Krogh. In 1835 he began to train as an artist, first at the Royal School of Drawing and Art in Christiania, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In 1838 he returned to Christiania and established himself as a portrait painter. Among the people he portrayed were Sofie Amalie Bekkevold who was the wife of Henrik Wergeland, violinist Ole Bull, landowner Isach Coldevin and his wife. But the camera eventually took away the basis for a career as a portrait painter, and he traveled abroad to develop as an artist. From the 1850s, Berg had copied pictures of the great masters. He traveled around famous art museums and copied Rembrandt, Rubens and others. Koipane was exhibited in Stockholm in 1857 and in Christiania in 1861. In 1863 he came to London to learn about watercolor measurement. In the 1870s, he painted a series of pictures depicting the Sami environment.
Sources: Falahat, Ann 2007: "Hans Johan Frederik Berg. Watercolourist, copyist and orientalist"; lexicon of Norwegian artists; on-line Wikipedia in Norwegian.
inscriptions: signed H.J.F.Berg and dated (18)44 on the chair.
Technique: gouache on organic wafer, convexes glas, lacque black wooden frame with bronze inner frame.
Measurements: image w 5" x h 6 1/2" ( 12,5 x 16,5 cm), framed 8" x 10 1/8"(20,3 x 25,8 cm).
Condition: perfect. |