Daisy Dunn

Outsider art | 21 February 2019

Plus: British dreamers at the Bohun Gallery's final show

If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg. The Norwegian painter  eschewed the cosy fireside for the great outdoors, eager to see what view might greet him as he wandered the woods and country roads of Norway in the failing light. While his contemporary Nikolai Astrup filled his landscapes with people, Sohlberg preferred to bring nature to the fore, at once unnerved and mesmerised by its power.

He excelled at depicting the scene just stumbled upon or left behind. In ‘Summer Night’ (1899), a table is set for two on a veranda overlooking the Kristiania Fjord off what is now Oslo. The glasses are half full, the fruit sliced but abandoned, the door of the house ajar. Have the diners slipped inside? Then look at the sunset they are missing.

A skiing trip to central Norway in 1899 showed Sohlberg just how much there was to learn from being outside. Standing beneath the Rondane mountains, he was struck by his insignificance. ‘The longer I stood gazing at the scene,’ he reflected, ‘the more I seemed to feel what a solitary and pitiful atom I was in an endless universe.’ He moved to the region a few years later and began making studies for what would be his masterwork, ‘Winter Night in the Mountains’ (1914).

The finished painting is a spirit-lifting piece that glows against the dark walls of the exhibition space. The mountains rise like icebergs into the night. A yellow star is perfectly placed between them. Like so many of Sohlberg’s paintings it has a highly illustrative, fairytale quality. Entering a room of his woodland scenes and studies of mermaids is like stepping into the world of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm.

Sohlberg originally trained as a decorative painter and retained a preference for clean lines.

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