Johann Berthelsen was a Danish-born American Impressionist painter, best known for the atmospheric, snow-filled scenes of New York City he produced over four decades — quiet evocations of Manhattan in winter that have become some of the most beloved twentieth-century American urban landscapes.
Johann Henrik Carl Berthelsen (July 25, 1883 – April 3, 1972) was a Danish-born American Impressionist painter and an accomplished operatic tenor. Born in Copenhagen and brought to the United States as a child, he trained as a singer first; following his graduation in 1905 he toured the United States and Canada in opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, and concert performance, then taught voice at the Chicago Musical College from 1910 and served as head of the voice department at the Indianapolis Conservatory of Music from 1913. His parallel interest in painting was encouraged by the Norwegian-American Impressionist Svend Svendsen, whose snow scenes drew him to what would become his own most identifiable subject, and by his lifelong friend the painter Wayman Adams.
Largely self-taught, Berthelsen turned increasingly to painting after the 1929 stock market crash deprived him of his voice students. He moved with his family to New York, set up a studio there in close proximity to Adams, and built across the next four decades the body of poetic Impressionist paintings of New York City — Fifth Avenue in winter, Madison Square in snow, the Plaza, Central Park, the streetscapes of Manhattan at dusk and twilight — for which he is now most widely known. His paintings are held in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Sheldon Swope Art Museum, and other regional and national institutions, and were collected during his lifetime by William Randolph Hearst, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman, and other prominent American patrons of the period.