Link to Substack article

By James Lucas, Substack

This is not a photograph, nor is it a digital image. I know it’s almost impossible to believe, but this is an oil painting made in 1883 by Peder Mørk Mønsted…



It's called The Woodland Glade. Sunlight pours down through a high forest canopy and scatters across the ground in a thousand shifting patches of gold and shadow, each one placed with a precision that hardly seems possible for a human hand.

In his own day, Mønsted was celebrated for his sublime skill. His reputation carried him around the world, and in 1893 he was received as a personal guest of King George I of Greece. During his time there, he painted both the royal family and the Greek countryside.

But Mønsted had two misfortunes: he usually painted landscapes rather than important people, and he did so just as the art world was beginning to lose its taste for the painstaking realism that had made his work so remarkable.

So his name slipped almost entirely out of art history…

And yet his paintings never stopped being loved: they circulate endlessly online, reposted by people who fall for a sunlit forest and, most of the time, have no idea who made it. The man has been forgotten, but the light he captured never has. Leonardo da Vinci once said it best: "A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not."

I started my newsletter because the past is full of masterpieces like this one, and so few people ever stop to show us why they matter. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, simply restack this post and subscribe! And if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

Thanks for reading.

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I subscribed to James Lucas's Substack because of his devotion to art, lost art and to forgotten painters who shouldn't be. I'll share now and then. Hopefully you'll like some of it as much as I do.