Winter Landscape. Utterslev near Copenhagen

Albert Gottschalk's winter landscape of Utterslev near Copenhagen demonstrates his ability to find pictorial richness in the quietest of subjects. Utterslev was a small village north of the Copenhagen city center, and Gottschalk painted its winter fields and frozen ponds with the attentiveness that characterized his approach to Danish urban and suburban landscape. The 1887 canvas shows snow transforming the familiar landscape into something austere and luminous. It is held at Statens Museum for Kunst.

Gottschalk constructs the winter scene in cool near-monochrome, with the white expanse of snow providing the dominant tone and dark tree trunks and hedgerows providing structure. The sky is pale and overcast, its subtle gradations carefully observed.