Niels Lergaard

Niels Lergaard (1893–1982) was a Danish painter. After training as a house painter, he spent a few years in Norway, where he became interested in Norwegian landscape painting. On returning to Denmark he studied and later taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (1917–20).

In the late 1920s, he moved to the picturesque Danish island of Bornholm where his paintings displayed the careful construction that characterized his work, for example in his landscapes of Gudhjem. He painted the sea, with a high horizon, the coast, figures with precisely constructed silhouettes, or Bornholm’s steep cliffs.

The dark colours he used in the 1930s were gradually replaced by a lighter palette. He worked to release new expressive possibilities from oil colours and in this way further emphasized the luminous power and depth of the picture plane. Thus his landscapes display a deeply symbolic, transcendent power.

See also

• Art of Denmark
• Bornholm school of painters