Anon. Almannagjá Chasm, Thingvellir National Park, Iceland

An original 1878 watercolour painting Almannagjá Chasm, Thingvellir National Park, Iceland.

An exquisitely beautiful and pristine 19th-century watercolour depicting a landscape at the spectacular Thingvellir (Þingvellir) National Park in Iceland, east of Reykjavík. The park sits in a rift valley caused by the separation of two tectonic plates, with rocky cliffs and fissures, including the huge Almannagjá fault, seen here in the foreground. The painting also shows the river Öxará which flows lake-to-lake in the national park.

An associated inscription identifies a date of October 1878; this painting was no doubt executed from a tour of Iceland at this time. The artist is most likely British.

The picture resembles the style of 19th-century travel book illustrations, such as those in two publications which include Iceland, The Polar World (1869) by Georg Hartwig and Nature's Wonders: Pictures Of Remarkable Scenes In Foreign Lands (1867) by John Walter. Artists illustrating such publications usually worked anonymously. Travel books were extremely popular in Britain in the 19th century, and the aim of these types of illustrations was to crystallise and convey to the British public the impressive, surprising and exotic landscapes of foreign lands, which would likely remain out of reach to the average reader. Here, as was typical, small figures are featured in the landscape to provide a sense of its grand scale and also to place the reader themselves within the landscape.

Iceland in particular commanded popular fascination and was, even in the late 19th century, a destination for the adventurous and intrepid. The Icelandic sagas—medieval accounts of the histories and legends of early northern Europe—were newly translated by the likes of Walter Scott and George Dasent, which encouraged a wave of seafaring artists, novelists and poets to set sail for Iceland. William Morris visited in 1871 and again in 1873, Anthony Trollope visited in 1878 accompanied by the artist Jemima Blackburn, and William Gershom Collingwood spent three months there in 1897. In contrast to more scientific motivations of travellers at the beginning of the century (Joseph Banks who visited in 1772 and William Jackson Hooker in the early 1800s, for example), Romantic notions of Norse history and legend would bring aesthetic and emotional dimensions to these later travellers' responses, paving the way for Iceland's nature tourism that still thrives today.

In watercolour with touches of white bodycolour.

One of a stunning set of three Iceland landscapes by the same hand.