took courses in painting at the Royal Academy. Neither of those two men made their living from painting. They painted a few portraits, but their greatest merit was their valuation of the objects of art that still remained in Iceland in their time. These two men, Sigurdur Guðmundsson and Helgi Sigurðsson, were the founders of the National Mu- seum of Jceland. In the year 1874 Iceland obtained its constitution from the king of Denmark. This act was of funda- mental importance to Iceland and gave the people a hope of complete independence, a sounder economy and a more general and better education. The great Icelandic poets of the nineteenth cen- tury paved the way for the first Icelandic landscape painters by their awareness of their surroundings and of nature, the beauty of the country and the magnificence of its panorama. The nineteenth-cen- tury poets expressed all these impressions in their fine lyrics, and thus aroused a passionate feeling in the people for their country. The painters Thórarinn B. Thorláksson, Ásgrí- mur Jónsson, Jón Stefánsson and Jóhannes S. Kjar- val expressed in color what these great Icelandic poets had expressed in words. The painters of the first three decades of the twentieth century painted mainly landscapes. Ás- grímur Jónsson, Thórarinn B. Thorláksson and Jón Stefánsson were painters of panorama, each one seeing and painting the Icelandic landscape in his own personal way, feeling nature as a great per- sonal drama (Jón), a bright wonderful experience to have and to hold (Ásgrímur), an intimate world of repose (Thórarinn). Kjarval not only paints panorama with fantastic grandeur. He is also extremely sensitive to the in- timate side of nature. No one has ever painted lava and moss with such love and intensity. His close- ness to nature is so great that he seems to be at one with it. In the 1930’s several young artists who had been studying abroad, in Copenhagen, Oslo and Paris, returned to Iceland. These artists brought home with them new styles, new subject matter and new ideals. They had been influenced by the modern trends in European art. For them the most impor- tant subject matter was the human being—men and women at work in daily life, often depicted in super- human size. This was in the years after the great economic crises, and now there was no longer a man of leisure or a landscape of repose. The leading painters of this period are Gunnlaugur Scheving, Jón Engilberts, Nína Tryggvadóttir, Snorri Arin- bjarnar and Thorvaldur Skúlason. These painters, who painted large canvases in bold brush strokes did not find many admirers in the beginning, but are now respected and regarded as some of our greatest painters. Their style was new and different from what had been seen here before. These paint- ers have since their return to Iceland developed and modified their art and some have for decades painted abstract. Halldór Laxness, who later earned the No- bel prize, represented a similar movement in litera- ture at this period. Thorvaldur Skúlason held an

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