LONDON.- At Handeck, a work of about 1860 by Alexandre Calame and The Lower Falls of the Labrofoss (1827) by Johan Christian Dahl have been kindly donated to the National Gallery by Mr Asbjørn Lunde, through the American Friends of the National Gallery.

British audiences are well aware of the landscape tradition of Constable and Turner, but these acquisitions of artists not widely represented in UK public collections will introduce them to skilled and innovative landscape painters from elsewhere in Europe, many of whom enjoyed great reputations during their lifetimes.

Asbjørn Lunde is the son of Norwegian émigrés to the United States. In 1950 he began practising as a lawyer in New York. In 1968 he started buying Scandinavian paintings, and today he is one of the leading collectors and experts of the landscape painters of 19th - century Scandinavia and Switzerland. Nowhere else can Norwegian and Swiss landscape painting be compared so directly and in such depth as in his collection. In 2011, 51 works from this collection were the focus of the hugely popular National Gallery Sunley Room exhibition, Forests, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde Collection.

At Handeck (above) was executed high in the Haslital valley in the Bernese Alps. Positioned just to the left of centre, a lone, ancient pine tree appears to stand aside to offer the spectator a breath-taking view of the valley dropping away, at the bottom of which flows the river Aare. Calame has used a characteristic flat green in the valley which contrasts with the fine and delicate brushwork in the trees. A most striking element is the characteristic crispness of outline and flatness of colour in the rocks on either side of the valley. The Gallery owns one other painting by Calame, a studio work, The Lake of Thun (1854), which came with the Henry Vaughan Bequest in 1900.

The waterfalls of Labro – featured in The Lower Falls of the Labrofoss (right) - are located some 80 kilometres to the west of Oslo. The painting shows the lower of two falls there as the torrent spills from a declivity in the rocks, carrying with it tree trunks from lumbering operations upstream. Dahl probably visited the site on a sketching expedition to Norway in 1826, completing this work in his Dresden studio the following year. Today, the Labrofoss is the site of a hydroelectric power station. There are no other works by Dahl in the National Gallery.

Christopher Riopelle, National Gallery curator of post-1800 European paintings said “Asbjørn Lunde is remarkable in building a collection that traces the development, and shows the points of comparison, of two exciting modern landscape traditions. These paintings, highlights of the collection, allow the National Gallery to show our visitors landscape painting across nineteenth-century Europe in greater detail than ever before.”

National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi said ”The paintings gifted by Mr Lunde enrich an already wide-ranging collection of European 19th-century landscapes with two fine examples in the Romantic tradition. We are very grateful to him.”

Both works can be seen in Gallery C of the National Gallery alongside other nineteenth century paintings, including landscapes by Købke and Friedrich, and works by Corot, including The Four Times of the Day recently acquired for the Collection.