For pleasure and for prizes. Danish plein-air painting of the 1820s

The article describes the introduction of plein-air painting in 1820s Denmark, which was partly undertaken through the initiatives of a group of young academy students acting independently at the beginning of the decade, and partly through official art academy initiatives from 1823 onwards. With J.P. Møller’s introduction of an annual competition on landscape painting, open-air painting became part of the academic curriculum for painters – an initiative that recent art history usually attributes to Eckersberg.