Course 18 – Summer School On Campus
Monday 6 – Friday 10 July 2026
MaryAnne Stevens
£695
Course Description:
The call for political independence and defined national identities marked the development of visual, literary and musical cultures in the Nordic countries during the long nineteenth century. Artists sought to articulate unique national characteristics, as in the work of painters of the so–called Danish ‘Golden Age’, but were also confronted with constant challenges from international movements– from Naturalism to Symbolism, Expressionism and early Abstraction. This course considers how the national voices both proclaimed their specific visual identities and accommodated themselves to foreign visual manifestations as artists sought to capture the northern light and the region’s expansive terrains of untrammelled nature, complementing the music of Grieg and Sibelius and the writings of Ibsen. Sometimes, this accommodation reinforced the potency of artists’ distinct national visual languages, as seen in Peder Balke’s ghostly visions of snow-covered, mist-wrapped landscapes or Carl Larsson’s scenes of quintessential Swedish domestic life. In others, it elicited powerful individual syntheses, as in the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi, Nikolai Astrup, August Strindberg and Edvard Munch. All, however, were aware of the Nordic region’s peculiar qualities of the brilliant clarity and haunting beauty of the light and the brooding darkness not just of winter but also of the individual soul.
Lecturer's Biography
MaryAnne Stevens specialises in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century art, with particular reference to British, French and Nordic art in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She worked at the Royal Academy of Arts, where, as Director of Academic Affairs, she established the Learning Department and the Architecture Programme, professionalized the Collections, Library and Archive, and served as Acting Secretary. She left the Royal Academy in January 2013 to pursue a career as an independent art historian, curator, lecturer and consultant. She has curated many major international loan exhibitions the most recent being Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway (Clark Art Institute MA, Bergen and Stockholm, 2021-22) and After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art (National Gallery London, 2023). She co-organised the Courtauld conference, ‘The Early Reception of Impressionism in the UK: 1870 – 1917’ (December 2025)