Flower Meadow in the North, 1905
Harald Sohlberg
Norwegian, 1869-1935
Oil on canvas, 96 x 111 cm
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design - The National Gallery, Oslo. NG.M.00692

Sohlberg began Flower Meadow in the North in 1905, while he was staying at Gullikstad near Røros, and completed it in Paris the following year. It was shown at the 1906 Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania (Oslo), and purchased by the National Gallery. In a letter to Olaf Schou in 1903, Sohlberg wrote that he dreamed he would, one day, paint something "captivatingly beautiful". This picture is first and foremost a paean to beauty - the beauty of a landscape bathed in the distinctive half-light of a Nordic summer night. Sohlberg's starting point was a subject he could easily see at Gullikstad: large fields of white, ox-eye daisies. He made accurate studies of the flowers, and yet in the composition they become a carpet of stars that stretches towards the pale, full moon. What is near fuses with what is far. As in Winter Night in the Mountains, we become steeped in the landscape as we view it.

   

This exhibition has been organized by the Nordic National Galleries