This book is the most comprehensive study published until now about the prominent Latvian landscape painter Jūlijs Feders and his oeuvre. It comprises essays by well-known Latvian art historians each examining Feders life and work from different perspective (biography, style and subject matter of paintings, endeavours in photography, etc.), thus providing a many-sided study about this master of landscape painting.
Jūlijs Feders is among those artists whose art, enriched with influences from Western European movements, belongs in the context of the classic landscapes of the second half of the 19th century. Carefully and precisely recording the features of a real landscape – its specific geographical, geological and floral characteristics, its atmosphere and light – and highlighting the local setting of his motifs, the artist attained a conception of pronounced realism, letting the truth of nature reveal itself in painting.
The landscapes of Jūlijs Feders represent a vivid testimony to the 19th century’s piety and respect towards nature and the milieu of life, of the belief in the possibility of some all-encompassing harmony. The combination of rational study of a natural landscape and the poetic experience of a particular location makes Jūlijs Feders special among dozens of other landscape painters of the second half of the 19th century.