Think of Norway and you envisage fjords, but the best-known paintings of the country show its capital Oslo, in Edvard Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan and The Scream. This weekend we’re off to spend a couple of days visiting the streets of the city today, and the surrounding countryside tomorrow.

Oslo became a capital around 1300, and was originally centred on its royal residence and the mediaeval Akershus Fortress built to defend it. Much of the old city was destroyed by fire in 1624, so was rebuilt and renamed Christiania in honour of its King Christian IV. From 1877, when it was growing as a trading port, it was officially respelled as Kristiania, and was only renamed Oslo in 1925.

This map shows the relatively small urban area as it was in 1887. It’s situated at the northern end of Oslofjord, that broadens as it runs south to open into the eastern side of the North Sea opposite the artists’ colony at Skagen in Denmark. Most of its major buildings date from the nineteenth century, when it acquired its Royal Palace, parliament, university and commercial centre. Its population grew rapidly from less than ten thousand at the start of that century to nearly a quarter of a million by its end.

The centre of the city is dominated by its best-known street, Karl Johan, running from the Royal Palace in the west to the central railway station in the east.

Christian Krohg’s Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) from 1889 shows Karl Johan in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. They are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers in which to put the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

Edvard Munch painted numerous views of this street, here Karl Johan in the Rain from 1891. This shows it rising up towards the Royal Palace in the distance, with its pavements crowded with black umbrellas.

Munch’s famous Evening on Karl Johan from the following year was originally just known as Evening. This looks from the Royal Palace towards Storting (the parliament building) with greatly foreshortened perspective to pack the pedestrians together and instil a deep sense of anxiety.

Christian Krohg’s wife Oda painted this wonderful Portrait of Christian Krohg in about 1903. Although made during their years in Paris, it shows the artist by the Grand Café on Karl Johan, as a military band marches along the tramlines.

Munch continued to paint through the 1930s, although little of his work from those years is well known. Summer on Karl Johan Street, Oslo (1933) shows how much his style continued to evolve, and contrasts with his earlier dark, anxious and melancholic scenes. This view is from the west end of Karl Johan, close to the Royal Palace.

When Frits Thaulow returned to Norway at the end of the nineteenth century he painted several views of the Akerselva or Akerselven River running through industrial buildings in the eastern part of the city centre. Those include The Akerselven River in the Snow, probably painted between 1897-1901.

This is Thaulow’s atmospheric pastel of Winter in Akerselva from about 1897.

In 1912, Thorolf Holmboe painted another section of the river in Akerselva by Marselis’ gate. This is a more modern apartment block well to the north of the central station.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was born and brought up in the poor suburb of Hammersborg, to the north of Karl Johan.

During the early years of the twentieth century, Johannessen painted colourful street scenes of the city, such as this Market Scene from about 1916.

Johannessen’s Mother and Child (1918-20) is set in the Hammersborg district, where a care-worn working class mother is seen walking out at night, her young child held firmly within her shawl.

Gudmund Stenersen’s contrasting Sunday in Majorstuen from 1921 shows this more affluent suburb at the western edge of the city, where construction didn’t start until the end of the nineteenth century, when the railway reached it and made commuting easy. This winter’s day is sufficiently snowy for many of these folk to be carrying their cross-country skis, and one woman in the foreground is still skiing on hers.