View of the Rhine near Düsseldorf

Gerhard Munthe, a Norwegian artist who would later become famous for his decorative art and his designs drawing on Norse mythology and folk art, painted this landscape view of the Rhine near Düsseldorf in 1875 during his studies in Germany. Düsseldorf was a major center of landscape painting training for Scandinavian artists, and its academic tradition of careful, naturalistic landscape study was an important formative influence for many Norwegian painters. Munthe's Rhine landscape documents his German academic formation before his later development of a distinctively Norwegian decorative style.

Munthe renders the Rhine landscape with the careful, naturalistic technique of the Düsseldorf school — the broad river valley, its banks and distant hills, observed with patient attention to atmospheric conditions and tonal relationships.