Harald Sohlberg
Transport yourself to the wilds of rural Norway with this enchanting painting of a fjord and fisherman’s hut by Harald Sohlberg (1869–1935). Sohlberg was a symbolist artist and was captivated by the natural world. While he travelled throughout Europe, it was the sublime nature of his native Norway that captured his imagination. Many of his landscapes hint at mankind’s presence, without depicting human figures—suggesting landscapes of the soul. In this painting, Sohlberg places the viewer as an outsider looking down at the fjord at dusk, with the inviting light inside the cottage drawing your gaze in an otherwise solitary landscape.
Sohlberg’s works often balance a delicate attention to detail with the sublimity of nature. One critic remarked that “this kind of attention to detail makes you think a world could exist in a dewdrop.” In this painting, you can see the intricate cracked texture of the trees in the foreground, with a Japonisme style. Like many artists of this period, Sohlberg was influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and you can see its presence in the swirling nature of how he applies the paint. He often produced his paintings having studied and produced a range of photographs, sketches, and lithographs, which helped him to create these hyper-real details.
Like his peer, Edvard Munch, Sohlberg strongly denied the influence of other contemporary artists. Born in Kristiania (modern-day Oslo) in 1869, he originally trained as a decorative painter before studying for short periods under fellow Norwegian artists including Harriet Backer, Erik Werenskiold, and Eilif Peterssen. Sohlberg then went on to attend the art school of Kristian Zahrtmann in Copenhagen, where he encountered the work of Paul Gauguin and other Symbolist and Synthetist artists.
You can see this painting on display at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London until 2 June 2019, as part of Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway, celebrating 150 years since the artist’s birth. If you're in London, it's a must-see exhibition!
P.S. Read more about Harald Sohlberg, the solitary genius here.
Image: Fisherman’s Cottage, Oil On Canvas, Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Edward Byron Smith.