Caroline Bugler is spellbound by the Scandinavian landscape painter’s magical evocation of fjords, villages and mountains
NORWEGIAN art is having a moment. it all started four years ago, with the national gallery’s show of Peder Balke’s weird and wonderful landscapes. Then, nikolai Astrup’s rural idylls went on display at Dulwich Picture gallery in 2016. Dulwich has now followed this up with Harald Sohlberg’s mystical visions of the norwegian countryside and, hot on its heels, an exhibition devoted to edvard Munch, Sohlberg’s contemporary, opens tomorrow at the British Museum.
Munch’s art is famous all over the world—The Scream is an image so universal that it’s spawned an emoji—but Harald Sohlberg’s work is largely unfamiliar outside norway. Part of that is because the norwegians have kept his paintings to themselves; with the exception of a solitary example in Chicago, there is not a single picture by him in a public collection outside his native country.
This exhibition gives us a chance to see why the norwegians love him so much that they voted one of his pictures—the magnificently moody Winter Night in the Mountains (1914)—their national painting.
The pictures are arranged broadly chronologically, starting with Sohlberg’s early years and training and a few of his Symbolist pictures, including some very odd mermaids.
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