Winter in Vestre Aker

After the young artists’ “revolt” in 1882 against the entrenched, old-fashioned tastes that dominated the Kristiania art scene at the time, naturalism become the leading movement, and Frits Thaulow was one of the artists manning the barricades. His landscape paintings are chromatically complete without the brownish tones that often permeated the art of the Düsseldorf school: his summer landscapes are lush and verdant, his glistening rivers flow silently on, and his snowy vistas sparkle with the colours of the ski tracks.

The Thaulow family bought an estate in Frøen in Vestre Aker (now a part of central Oslo) in 1866, and from the 1870s on the area was frequently depicted by Frits Thaulow. Equipped with his warm wolfskin coat and his easily portable painting tools, Thaulow stood outside during the winter and painted. Winter, Vestre Aker in fact depicts these nearby surroundings, and we see how he renders the playfulness and vestiges of skiing in the light of a clear, crisp winter’s day.

Thaulow’s winter motifs won acclaim not only in Kristiania but also abroad. At the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, the French government bought another of his winter paintings, Winter in Norway (1886), which is today part of the collections of the Musée d’Orsay. The scene depicted in Winter in Norway is almost identical to the one in Winter, Vestre Aker, and in all likelihood the National Museum’s picture is a somewhat later replica.