At one time, many churches across northern Europe were constructed using load-bearing wooden posts termed staves, hence are known as stave churches. It’s thought that in Norway alone there used to be as many as two thousand. As they were built of wood rather than stone, fire was a danger, and between those that burned down and others that were replaced by more modern structures, there are now only thirty-one original stave churches remaining, all except three being in Norway. They have seldom been painted, and in this article I show paintings known to depict real churches from two Norwegian artists, and a relative from the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine.

JC Dahl’s Landscape in Kaupanger with a Stave Church from 1847 employs a little deception as the real church at Kaupanger had been modified structurally and looked quite different at the time. He therefore substituted the stave church at Vang, which had recently been dismantled.

Vang stave church had been built in the Middle Ages, and by 1832 was too small and in urgent need of structural repair. The local council had decided to demolish and replace it, and in 1839 JC Dahl intervened to save it. The artist bought the church at a public auction in 1841, and persuaded the then Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia to pay for the building’s removal, transportation and reconstruction in the remote village of Karpacz Górny in the Giant Mountains in Silesia. It has remained there ever since, serving a Polish Lutheran community, and attracts nearly a quarter of a million visitors each year.

The Norwegian artist Harriet Backer painted interiors of several Norwegian churches, including the stave church at Uvdal. This was built just after 1168, on the remains of an earlier church. It was expanded during the Middle Ages, and again in 1684, 1722 and 1819. Much of its internal decoration was undertaken in 1656, and extended as the building grew. It was taken out of regular use in 1893, and when Backer visited it services took place during the summer. It remains one of the finest decorated churches in northern Europe, and has been lovingly preserved.

Backer’s external view of Uvdal Church and Cemetery from 1906 is a faithful account of what from the outside looks quite a plain building. But once you get inside it, you enter another world.

Backer’s Uvdal Stave Church from 1909 does its rich decoration justice. Her brilliantly coloured view of the interior is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

The Altar at Uvdal Stave Church, painted the same year, shows the altar from one side, with its painting of the Last Supper hanging above the table, and more decorative work over the walls and ceiling. These have been painstakingly restored in the years since.

Although externally they may appear similar, wooden churches in the Carpathian Mountain region of Ukraine and Poland are structurally distinct, as they don’t rely on staves, but are built from horizontal logs.

At the end of his training in Munich, Teodor Axentowicz paid his first visit to the lands of the Hutsul people, in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His oil painting of a Hutsul Funeral from 1882 shows the Hutsul in the rigours of winter, the coffin being towed on a sledge behind a cart, and the mourners clutching candles as they make their way through the snow to the wooden tserkva in the distance.

Further reading

Stave church on Wikipedia
Uvdal Stave Church, Wikipedia
Tserkvas of the Carpathians, Wikipedia.

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.

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.

You didn’t have to travel far in 1887 before you left the city of Oslo, and reached the countryside around it. Following yesterday’s paintings of the centre, today I show a selection of those from nearby.

To remind you, this map shows the extent of the city of Christiania in 1887.

Peder Balke’s view of Frognerkilen and Bygdøy seen from Skillebekk painted in about 1855 comes as a surprise, as he’s known today for his dramatic coastal views of north Norway, up to North Cape, its most northerly point on the mainland. This less rugged view is from the south-west suburb of Skillebekk looking to the south-west to the island of Bygdøy, with its grand neo-Gothic castellated mansion of Oscarshall, now a museum.

Georg Fredrik Nielsen Strømdal’s panoramic view of Kristiania seen from Egeberg from 1889 is one of the finest of the city at the time. This looks to the west from a hill at Egeberg to the south-east of the city. The mouth of the Loelva River is in the foreground, and behind it the port and industrial buildings of Bispevika and Bjørvika. In the right distance is the Royal Palace, with Oscarshall further to the left.

In the summer of 1886, Eilif Peterssen painted on Fleskum Farm in Bærum, now an affluent suburb to the west of Oslo, with Harriet Backer, Kitty Kielland, and others. One evening he started work on his view of the local lake, Dæhlivannet, which became one of his greatest landscape works, Summer Night (1886).

The following year, he took that same view, added some flowers, and worked in a nude to produce his Nocturne (1887), which was also widely acclaimed. The contrast in finish is marked, with the earlier painting crisp in its detail, while this version is more painterly.

Peter Nicolai Arbo, better known for his paintings of Nordic myth, is unusually painterly in this landscape of a View of Frognerslot from Skovveien (1890). This old manor house is set in a Baroque garden that now forms part of Oslo’s largest park.

Eilif Peterssen returned to Bærum in the summer of 1891, when he painted the Impressionist Sunshine, Kalvøya (1891), compared by the critics to the paintings of Berthe Morisot.

By 1916, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen and his family were spending their summers in a rented house in Asker, a rural area just outside Oslo that was already popular with Norwegian artists including Harriet Backer.

Johannessen’s Rain (1915-16) is an evocative painting of a thoroughly wet day there. Asker is on the bank of Oslo Fjord, and ideal for family coastal sailing, and walking.

His Landøen in Asker (1916) is a view of part of the dissected coastline near Asker, south-west from the city, down Oslofjord.

The Artist’s Summer House in Asker (1916) shows their rented property, with the artist’s wife Anna making her way up its steps.

The last brushstroke has to be Edvard Munch’s.

Munch returned to painting landscapes after the First World War. Starry Night (1922–24) is one of the most distinctive of these, showing the woods and snow-covered hills outside the distant city of Oslo.

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.