This exhibition explores Nordic attitudes to nature and the significance which landscape has had, and continues to have, in Nordic culture and thinking. Landscape painting assumed particular importance around the middle of the nineteenth century, when landscape subjects became crucial symbols in the Nordic countries' search for national identity. At the same time, the landscape art of the region was open to wider European influences, evolving in a field of force between the national and the international.

The works included in the exhibition are grouped thematically under five headings: Nordic Sublime, Close to Nature, In the Open Air, Evocative Landscape and Landscapes of the Mind. By and large, this thematic structure also reflects the chronological development of landscape painting, from the heroic, romantic wildernesses of the 1840s to the dreamy, inward-looking mental landscapes of the turn of the century.

A Mirror of Nature is a collaborative venture of the Nordic national galleries in Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. Featuring over a hundred high-class paintings by leading artists, it seeks to illuminate and discuss the distinctive Nordic contribution to the artistic representation of landscape in the nineteenth century.

The exhibition will be shown at the national galleries in the Nordic capitals and at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, according to the following itinerary:

The Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki
April 21 - August 27, 2006

The Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
September 30, 2006 - January 14, 2007
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
February 15 - May 20, 2007

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
June 24 - September 2, 2007
The Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
October 6, 2007 - January 20, 2008