Painting Norway: Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928), exhibition review: Unique portrayal of an extraordinary landscape

Few painters have been marked by their childhood as much as the Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup. Born in 1881, he grew up in Ålhus, a village surrounded by mountains and looking over a lake in the county of Jølster. It is a landscape of extraordinary beauty and majesty, loaded for Astrup with the ghosts of folklore: trolls in trees, ice maidens seen in the undulating mountain tops.

The damp parsonage he grew up in was a motif in his paintings but also affected him physically — a sickly man, he’d walk in that Norwegian summer twilight, where it never gets dark, because it was better for his health.

All of this, married to clear talent and eccentricity, helped make him one of Norway’s most distinctive painters. Studying in Paris in the 1900s, he was able to return to Norway armed with a sophisticated language and dedicate his working life to capturing Jølster’s changing moods. How vividly he did so, despite occasional awkwardness in his figures. From delicate marsh marigolds amid deep green fields, to the serene blue of the lake, to the fires of pagan celebrations for Midsummer’s Eve, it’s a unique landscape, uniquely captured.

Until May 15, Dulwich Picture Gallery (020 8693 5254, dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk)

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