Following Norway’s national painter through a landscape of mountains and fjords

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Roros, a 19th-century mining town in Norway that is now a Unesco Heritage Site, in October 2023. Harald Sohlberg is celebrated within his native country and almost unknown outside it. A writer goes in search of the artist’s inspiration in Norway’s overwhelming nature. Photo / Chiara Zonca, The New York Times
Pamela Paul ventures to Norway to see Harald Sohlberg, one of the broodiest symbolist painters of the early 20th century and nearly unknown outside his native country.

People go to Giverny to see the gardens that moved Monet and to Arles for the fields behind van
Gogh’s madness. They trek through the Louvre as if by magnetic force, seeking — what else? — the Mona Lisa selfie.

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But I went to Norway to see Harald Sohlberg, one of the broodiest symbolist painters of the early 20th century and nearly unknown outside his native country. I’d fallen for Sohlberg’s haunting images at a 1995 exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York, but hadn’t been able to track him down since. It turns out that apart from a single painting at the Art Institute in Chicago, his paintings are only on permanent display in Norway. The first retrospective outside Norway didn’t appear until 2019, in Dulwich, England. Yet Sohlberg is celebrated at home, where his iconic Winter Night at Rondane is Norway’s national painting, the kind of image reproduced on magnets, calendars and tourism websites.
“Sohlberg thought deeply about what it meant to be a human being in this huge, overwhelming nature,” Oivind Storm Bjerke, who curated the exhibit that introduced me to Sohlberg, told me before my departure. Unlike many of his peers, Sohlberg, influenced by the existential philosophy and German romanticism of the time, preferred to work in isolation, unaffiliated with a school or group of artists, and to do so, he set off into the mountains.
I decided to follow him. The plan was to start in Oslo, where Sohlberg was born in 1869, at the magnificent National Museum in Oslo, which opened in 2022. From there, travelling with my husband and one of our children, I’d trace the artist’s melancholic steps into the less touristed region of central Norway. Our long, counterclockwise route took us northward from the capital through the small towns and national parks that inspired Sohlberg’s most renowned works of art.
The National Museum could easily serve as its own full tour. The museum boasts the country’s largest collection of Sohlberg, including Winter Night at Rondane, which is shown in full natural light and on its own wall like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Not all Sohlberg’s paintings are on display, but a curator brought me into the museum’s state-of-the-art archives, where I could view paintings by Sohlberg that I’d only seen online (plus several from the museum’s vast Edvard Munch holdings) and into the library, which contains Sohlberg’s numerous studies and sketches for his Winter Night masterpiece, a fan’s dream voyage into the artist’s ruminative 15-year-long process.
On view in the permanent exhibit are two of his warmer paintings (by which I mean slightly less melancholic). Summer Night, in which an empty terrace set with glasses and dishes, seemingly abandoned, overlooks the country’s lakes and mountains, typifies how Sohlberg handles human figures — more an implied presence than an overt one. His similarly unpopulated Evening Glow offers a sunset view over the Rondane landscape, also during summer, the trees still verdant against the burnt orange of reflected sky. Travelling in August, I knew I’d miss the cerulean gleam of Winter Night, but it was these other kinds of seasonal views I was eager to see for myself.
Norway was at the tail end of unnaturally heavy rains, endured almost non-stop from June to August 2023. Nevertheless, we stepped out into the downpour twice on our way to the nearby Gudbrandsdalen valley, which is also home to the site of the 1994 Olympics, Lillehammer. First, at Ringebu, where we stopped to admire one of Norway’s 28 extant stave churches, the wooden Viking structures that date to the 12th century. Then at Sohlberg Place, the vista in Rondane National Park from which Sohlberg painted Winter Night in Rondane, which he began sketching in 1899 and worked on until 1914.
Clouds muffled the moonlit peaks that feature so mysteriously in his expressive painting. But it didn’t matter. His landscapes are as much psychological as they are literal representations. Drenched in colour with an almost enamel-like finish, Sohlberg’s paintings are animated despite being nearly devoid of human figures. Many are what the Norwegians call “stemnings” or mood paintings. We didn’t get the glassy blues of his Winter Night in Rondane, but the misty greys and dark green of the forest conveyed their own eerie stillness.
It was too rainy to spend much time outside, so we side-tripped to Roros, a 19th-century mining town that is now a Unesco Heritage Site, owing to its well-preserved wooden buildings, and headed underground into the copper mines. Occasional translations into English illuminated the freezing hour-long Norwegian tour through the oldest parts of the mine, which date to the 1600s.
Sohlberg lived on and off in Roros, and if you walk up the main street, which is lined with gift shops, galleries, cafes and excellent sporting goods stores (best to layer up before heading into the mines), you’ll find the well-marked spot from which he painted Street in Roros, with its church steeple almost stirring up a storm in the darkening clouds. We warmed up with smoked salmon sandwiches on freshly baked bread and the cinnamony swirls the Norwegians call kanelsnurrer at the packed Trygstad Bakeri and Konditori, a cafe that dates to 1906.
Rain or no rain — and it was rain — we were determined to go white water rafting. The idea being not just to appreciate Sohlberg’s artistic inspiration, but to enjoy it for ourselves. But the local rafting companies deemed the Sjoa River, one of Norway’s prime rafting centres, too flooded, even for hardy Norwegians. On one of the “calmer” nearby rivers that we took instead, one woman on our raft nevertheless toppled overboard during a rough stretch. When her husband tried to reel her in, the boat pitched sharply, ready to capsize. “You’ll have to forget about her!” I nearly hissed at him in a panic. But the guide managed to right the boat and recuperate the wayward swimmer; we made it back to shore unscathed.
It feels silly to travel to Norway without at least one fjord, so we boarded the Rauma Railway, one of the country’s celebrated scenic train routes, from Dombas to the port of Andalsnes, which lies within the Romsdalsfjord. The trip takes you past Trollveggen, one of the tallest rock walls in Europe, and over the Kylling Bridge, which was spectacularly destroyed in the most recent Mission Impossible movie. Off-screen, crossing the much-photographed stone bridge, which crosses a narrow pass over the Rauma River, is still possible. Harry Potter also rode this train in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in one of the few scenes filmed outside England.
Circling back toward Oslo, we pitched ourselves at the Hindsaeter Mountain Hotel to the west of Rondane. We were now more squarely in Munch territory than in Sohlberg’s, but the surrounding landscape had served as a gathering spot for other Norwegian artists of the period. A path outside the inn, which is charmingly decorated in rustic Alpine textiles and wood, leads travellers along Munch’s pathway in the surrounding area, which borders Jotunheimen National Park, home to Norway’s tallest peaks.
Fans of Norse mythology, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe version thereof, will know this as Loki’s birthplace, home of the giants. It offers some of the best hiking in the country, including the eight-hour trek over the Besseggen Ridge, a popular day hike, though not, alas, one to embark on in heavy rain. Numerous less-famous trails stem out directly from the hotel. Like Hjerkinn, the more upscale Hindsaeter served an excellent vegetarian-friendly dinner and buffet breakfast.
It was time to loop back to Oslo. Unlike many visitors to Norway, we had yet to travel by boat, so we decided to cruise vicariously. On a peninsula, just a 20-minute bus ride from the city centre, stand three elegantly designed museums devoted to sea travel. The Kon-Tiki Museum houses the original raft Thor Heyerdahl used to travel from Peru to the islands of the South Pacific. The Fram Museum displays the first wooden ship built in Norway specifically for polar exploration, and yet more boats await at the Norwegian Maritime Museum next door. All three are excellent stand-ins for the popular Viking Museum, which is closed for renovation until 2027.
From the walkway outside these museums, you could see Oslo’s waterfront across the way. You could see the outline of Akershus, the city’s medieval military fortress and castle. And you could see what Oslo may have looked like as it appeared in one of Harald Sohlberg’s sunnier paintings, Oslo, from Akershus, a rare work of his to include people. They stand by the bow of a boat at the water’s edge, facing outward toward the violet mountains beckoning from a distance, as if ready to take off.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Pamela Paul
Photographs by: Chiara Zonca
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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