Blomstersamlerske 1844

This is Johan Thomas Lundbye’s drawing, ‘Blomstersamlerske’, made in 1844. The lithograph shows a woman viewed from behind, lightly adorned in classical drapery, pausing in a field to collect flowers. The soft, tonal gradations create a serene yet ambivalent atmosphere. Lundbye’s mark-making employs a rich vocabulary of hatched and cross-hatched lines to construct areas of shadow and volume. The woman is positioned as a central motif, but her averted gaze redirects our attention outwards into the broader field, and upwards to the gothic, calligraphic lettering at the top. The various plants and foliage are meticulously rendered, displaying Lundbye's acute observational skills. The combination of classicising figure and naturalistic depiction of the landscape invites questions about the relationship between the ideal and the real, the classical and the romantic. Lundbye seems to challenge any fixed separation of these categories, suggesting a more fluid interplay between them. This tension animates the drawing, endowing it with a speculative, open-ended quality, even as it achieves a visually satisfying synthesis.