Valdemar Christian Schønheyder Møller (5 January 1864 – 3 May 1905) was a Danish painter, known principally for his depictions of sunlight.

Biography

Møller was born at

Aarhus Aarhus (, , ; officially spelled Århus from 1948 until 1 January 2011) is the second-largest city in Denmark and the seat of Aarhus Municipality. It is located on the eastern shore of Jutland in the Kattegat sea and approximately northwest ...

, Denmark. He was the son of Carl Johan Ferdinand Møller (1815–73) and Reinholdine Christiane Schønheyder (1835–1904). He began his art studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1883–84), then switched to the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler, where he studied under the supervision of

P.S. Krøyer PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Bro ...

.Elisabeth Fabritius
Valdemar Schønheyder Møller
Kunstindeks Danmark & Weilbach Kunstnerleksikon It was there he became friends with

Vilhelm Hammershøi Vilhelm Hammershøi (), often anglicised as Vilhelm Hammershoi (15 May 186413 February 1916), was a Danish painter. He is known for his poetic, subdued portraits and interiors.Souren Melikian,Hammershoi's decade of brilliance, before banality set ...

(1864–1916) and took photographs that became the basis for some of Hammershøi's early paintings. He was, in fact, one of the earliest Danish painters to use photography as an artistic medium. In 1891, he moved to Skagen, where he became acquainted with the

Skagen Painters The Skagen Painters ( da, Skagensmalerne) were a group of Scandinavian artists who gathered in the village of Skagen, the northernmost part of Denmark, from the late 1870s until the turn of the century. Skagen was a summer destination whose scen ...

, and remained there until 1893. It was in Skagen that he began his intensive study of the effects of light. In 1894, he went to Paris to join his brother, Tyge, who was an art collector; then settled in

Fontainebleau Fontainebleau (; ) is a commune in the metropolitan area of Paris, France. It is located south-southeast of the centre of Paris. Fontainebleau is a sub-prefecture of the Seine-et-Marne department, and it is the seat of the ''arrondissement ...

in 1896. He continued his studies of light, producing a series of over thirty works with the sun's direct light as their theme; many depicting the sun as rises, shining through the trees. Sometimes, he would briefly stare at the sun, to recreate the lights and colors induced in his retina. He soon became known as the painter of the sun (''Le peintre du Soleil''). Although largely forgotten today, he was once a familiar figure at exhibitions, including the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition (1885–87, 1889–92), the Salon de la Société Nationale (1895–1903) and at

Exposition Universelle (1889) The Exposition Universelle of 1889 () was a world's fair held in Paris, France, from 5 May to 31 October 1889. It was the fourth of eight expositions held in the city between 1855 and 1937. It attracted more than thirty-two million visitors. The ...

and

Exposition Universelle (1900) The Exposition Universelle of 1900, better known in English as the 1900 Paris Exposition, was a world's fair held in Paris, France, from 14 April to 12 November 1900, to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate developmen ...

. Throughout his life, he suffered from

bipolar Bipolar may refer to: Astronomy * Bipolar nebula, a distinctive nebular formation * Bipolar outflow, two continuous flows of gas from the poles of a star Mathematics * Bipolar coordinates, a two-dimensional orthogonal coordinate system * Bipolar ...

episodes. In 1901, he was admitted to Århus Sindssygehospital, the psychiatric hospital in

and remained there until his death in 1905.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Moller, Valdemar 1864 births 1905 deaths 19th-century Danish painters Danish male painters Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts people Artists from Aarhus Danish landscape painters People with bipolar disorder 19th-century Danish male artists