(b Vorup, nr Randers, 10 Feb 1893; d 1982). Danish painter. He trained as a house painter and spent a few years in Norway, where he became interested in Norwegian landscape painting. After his return to Denmark he studied at the Kunstakademi, Copenhagen (1917–20); he later taught there (1956–64). His early paintings were mostly figure compositions and landscapes that reveal an expressive interpretation of his surroundings. In the late 1920s, when he moved to the island of Bornholm in the Baltic, his compositions first achieved the disciplined construction that came to characterize his work. He often took a particular place, especially Bornholm (e.g. Landscape, Gudhjem, 1932; Humlebæk, Louisiana Mus.), as the point of departure for his pictures. He painted the sea, with a high horizon, the coast, figures with precisely constructed silhouettes, or Bornholm’s steep cliffs. Lergaard clarified pictorial space with great concentration: he composed rhythmically the distribution of heavy and light masses on the picture plane and managed to achieve a tangible, material intimacy while concentrating on the formal elements of the composition. The dark colours he used in the 1930s, as in People in an Interior (1937; ex-priv. col., see Rabén & Sjögren: Lexikon över modern skandinavisk konst, Stockholm, 1958, p. 139), 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.

• Lergaard(-Nielsen), Niels (Christian)
  • Denmark, §III, 3: Painting and graphic arts, after 1840