Peder Balke

Peder Andersen was born on November 4, 1804, in Hedemarken into modest rural circumstances. After study at the Royal Drawing School in Christiania and the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, he undertook an epic journey along the coast of northern Norway to North Cape in 1832.

The wild, sublime landscapes of the Arctic Ocean transformed Balke's artistic vision. Developing an astonishingly modern technique using fluid brushwork, rags, and finger-wiping across wet monochrome grounds, he captured the fury of Arctic waves and remote lighthouses in works like The Tempest and Lighthouse on the Norwegian Coast. Overlooked in his later life, his radical minimalism was celebrated with major retrospectives at the National Gallery in London in 2014.