With summer here at last, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s time to head north away from the heat and spend a weekend exploring the fjords of Norway in the company of some of the nation’s great landscape artists. Today we’ll see the development of painting during the nineteenth century, then tomorrow we’ll conclude with the early twentieth century.

We start with the founding father of the golden age of painting in Norway, Johan Christian Claussen Dahl, who was born in Bergen, Norway.

In February 1827, Dahl painted one of the finest winter landscapes of a Norwegian fjord, Winter at Sognefjord. This is the largest and deepest of all the Norwegian fjords, shown deserted apart from a few crows gathered around the base of what appears to be a pinnacle of ice. This might be the famous Balder or Frithjof memorial stone at Leikanger.

Hans Gude was in the next generation, and in the earlier part of his career collaborated with fellow-countryman Adolph Tidemand.

Among the results of this collaboration are some of their most spectacular works, such as Bridal Journey in Hardanger (1848). Gude’s highly detailed and realistic landscape is set in the far south-west of Norway, in the region to the east of Bergen, where one of the world’s largest and most spectacular fjords carves its way from glacier to the sea.

Sandvik Fjord (1879) is Gude’s startlingly detailed depiction of a view from above Sandviken, now the northern suburbs of the Norwegian city of Bergen, looking to the west and the island of Askøy.

The most prolific of those who painted the fjords was Eilert Adelsteen Normann, who like many Norwegian artists of the century trained in Germany, in Düsseldorf. He was responsible for attracting many visitors to Norway, who bought his paintings, and in the early 1890s for helping Edvard Munch to success.

Normann’s From Romsdal Fjord, painted in 1875, is the earliest of his dated works that I have located. It shows the ninth longest fjord in Norway, carving its way through this huge mountain gorge. A small party of well-dressed people have arrived in small boats, for a picnic on a rock spit. A sailing boat is gliding slowly along the mirror surface of the water, and in the far distance is a steamer.

A couple of summers later, Normann returned to the same fjord and painted Romsdal Fjord (1877), using a similar formula for its staffage. Next to his signature, at the lower left, the artist states that this work was painted not in Norway but when he was back in Düsseldorf.

Munken gård in Esefjord was painted on the shore of this tributary to the mighty Sognefjord, in the south-west of Norway, near Normann’s summer cabin.

One of the regular passenger and cargo ferry services steams up an unidentified fjord in Normann’s The Steamship.

Sognefjord, Norway returns to Norway’s longest and deepest fjord, as it carves its way due east from the southern bulge of the coastline. This view features Normann’s favourite small craft, and the sky and rock have become very painterly.

Sognefjord is fed by meltwater from Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in continental Europe, and the Hurrungane mountain range, rising to its highest peak Store Skagastølstind, with an elevation of 2,405 metres (7,890 feet). Like several Norwegian mountains, that was first climbed by the English mountaineer William Cecil Slingsby, on 21 July 1876. Slingsby made many first ascents in Norway during his thirty-year climbing campaign there from 1872, and is often regarded as the father of Norwegian mountaineering.