A poet of solitude: Peder Balke's haunting visions of the Arctic Circle

National Gallery, London
The first UK exhibition devoted to the eerie mystery of this 19th-century master shows just how precociously modern he was

Peder Balke lived in an Arctic of the mind. The 19th-century Norwegian painter explored the Arctic Circle and saw the mighty blank wall of rock that is the North Cape as a young man. He painted the frozen spectacle of the most remote regions of Norway for the rest of his life. The grandeur of the northern extremes got inside him; people rarely appear in his pictures; shipwrecks and ice-bound towns stand in for human life. Balkes imagination is ice-bound, frozen in contemplation of something at the very edge of human experience.

The first paintings in this haunting exhibition, which bring an unjustly obscure visionary back into the light of day, are big, expansive views of the North Cape, where today tourists travel to see the midnight sun. Balke brings out its ineffable mystery. He sees in it a silent barrier, the final limit to knowledge and exploration beyond it lies nothing. The sky above the massed rock is terrifyingly empty. The sea stretches into an inhuman void.

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