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Paintings of Norwegian Fjords 1900-28
On the second day of this weekend’s visit to the fjords of Norway, we’ve reached the twentieth century, and a pupil of Eilert Adelsteen Normann (1848-1918).
Clearly inspired by Normann’s views of the fjords, Elisabeth Grüttefien’s style is quite distinct, as shown in her undated Fjord Landscape. Her greens are more vibrant, and there are some fluffy red patches in her blue sky.
In her Fjord with Steamer from about 1900, she includes a sailing boat and one of the larger steamships, just as might have appeared in Normann’s paintings.
She also found some different motifs. In Fjord Landscape, also from about 1900, it is spring, and there’s still plenty of snow left from the winter. Groups of birch trees have yet to come into leaf.
Sadly, Elisabeth Grüttefien then vanished, and her paintings stopped.
Nikolai Astrup, the last landscape artist in this series, spent most of his life in the hamlet of Jølster, to the north of Sognefjord, where his father was the parish priest. He trained under two great Norwegian painters, Harriet Backer and Christian Krogh, and under Lovis Corinth in Berlin. Unlike the previous artists, Astrup was no visitor to the fjords, he lived among them.
Kollen, translated as The Barren Mountain, or simply The Fell, (1905-06) shows one of the huge rocky outcrops towering over the coast of fjords and lakes in this part of Norway. Astrup must have painted this during the late winter.
Astrup recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. His father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard, a rite that had taken place many times over the preceding centuries, and was to follow the artist’s own early death in 1928.
Grey Spring Evening (before 1908) is one of Astrup’s finest paintings of Jølster Lake. In its suffuse light, the hill dominating the opposite bank has rich earths and a shallow strip of green fields near the water’s edge. The pale green spring foliage on the trees in the foreground is muted, and a rowing boat out in the middle of the lake seems a tiny speck lost in the midst of nature.
Jølster Lake is fed from meltwater from Jostedalsbreen, and there’s still abundant snow on the mountains in Astrup’s view of A June Night and Old Jølster Farm, with its lush carpet of marsh marigolds.
His prints clearly influenced his painting style. Kari – Motif from Sunde (c 1918) shows an elfin figure of a girl who has been painted as if in an illustration, or perhaps one of Carl Larsson’s popular albums.
The Cold Frame Mound (c 1921-28) reveals the Astrup family vegetable garden by their house at Sandalstrand, including the ‘cold frame’ of the title. Despite their name, cold frames actually protect plants from the cold, and are used to enable earlier starting of vegetable crops. Sinking the cold frame into the ground (and siting it on a high point) protects its contents from ground frosts, while covering it with glazed windows ensures that daylight can raise the air and soil temperatures within it.
For much of his career, Astrup’s prints and paintings had informed and influenced one another; The Befring Mountain Farms (c 1924-28) is an example of his mixing the media in a single work, coupling woodblock printing with oil painting. It shows an extended series of farm buildings not far from Jølster Lake.
Astrup uses the natural environment to generate one of his most magical works. Two people are engaged in milking a goat by the entrance to a building in the left foreground. The farm buildings have turf roofs with luxuriant growth, in one case sporting a small tree. Spindly birches stand next to them, their leaves shimmering in the light of the crescent moon. That moon is reflected in a small pond surrounded by marsh marigolds in full flower. You can hear the silence among the massive rock bluffs towering over the lake, and that in the centre looks like the head of an owl, watching over the stillness of the night.
