Agnes Lunn’s Norwegian Landscape

The Hirschsprung Collection has acquired a landscape painting by the sculptor and painter Agnes Lunn (1850–1941), an artist whom the museum has long wished to include in its collection. With Fir Trees near Sandefjord, Norway, we can add another important artist to the story of nineteenth-century Danish art.

Agnes Lunn belonged to the generation of women artists explored by the museum in the exhibition and research project Women visualising the modern. Danish art 1880-1910

in 2024–2025. These pioneering artists worked professionally across a wide range of genres, despite having more limited access to education and exhibition opportunities than their male colleagues.

Today, Lunn is represented by only a small number of paintings in Danish museums, and her work is rarely exhibited. Like many artists of her time, she travelled abroad in search of new subjects and impressions. Fir Trees near Sandefjord, Norway was painted during a stay in Norway in 1893 and presents her as a travelling artist with a keen eye for the landscape. Women painted landscapes alongside their male colleagues, yet many of their works have since been overlooked. For a long time, landscape painting was regarded as a predominantly male domain, and this has influenced the way art history was later written and presented.

In Fir Trees near Sandefjord, Norway, the fir trees rise dark and distinct within the landscape. The atmospheric painting remains in its original frame and will become a natural addition to the museum’s extensive collection of nineteenth-century landscape art. Here, it can take its place alongside the period’s other landscapes and help broaden the story of who shaped Danish art history.