Janus Andreas La Cour
(Ringkobing 1837 - 1909 Copenhagen)

Mausoleum and Tor de' Schiavi of the Villa Gordiani at the Via Prenestina in Rome
1898

Oil on canvas
44.1 x 75 cm

Inscribed, dated and signed Campagna / 5. April 1898 / J. la Cour
On the verso a label Aug. Wirth's EFTF. / (Rich. Wilstrup) / Kunsthandel / Vimmelskaftet 36

Exhibited:
Foreningen for national Kunsts Udstilling, 1901, Nr. 185

Literature:
Rikard Magnussen, Landskabsmaleren Janus La Cour 1837-1909, Kopenhagen 1928, Werkverzeichnis Nr. 787 Ruin i Campagnen

Janus La Cour[1] studied at the Art Academy in Copenhagen. In the early part of his career he was strongly influenced by the important landscapist Peter Christian Skovgaard. He first exhibited in 1855. He was in Paris and Rome between 1865 and 1867. Later he travelled extensively in Italy, also in 1898.

Janus La Cour owed much to the legacy of the artists of the Danish Golden Age - the Copenhagen Academy school of painting in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Romantic style of painting developed at the academies in Hamburg, Copenhagen and Dresden was markedly different from other European academy schools of the period. La Cour, by contrast, responded to the early Realism of the Düsseldorf School of the 1850s and 1860s but retained his predilection for the idealized handling of light derived from the artists of the Danish Golden Age.

[1] For his biography see: Torsten Gunnarson, Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven, 1998, p.147f; Weilbach, Nyt dansk Kunstnerlexikon, Copenhagen, 1896, p.182.