Lot 311: f - CHRISTIAN SKREDSVIG NORWEGIAN, 1854-1924

oil on canvas

120.5 by 95cm., 47 1/2 by 37 1/2 in.

Venice, II Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, 1897

Ingrid Reed Thomsen, Chr. Skredsvig, Oslo, 1995, p. 120, illustrated

PROPERTY OF A NORWEGIAN PRIVATE COLLECTOR

C. W. Blomqvist, Christiania, 1897 (acquired from the artist)
Acquired by the grandfather of the present owner before 1939; thence by descent

Painted in 1897.

Following his studies first in Christiania and then in Copenhagen and Munich, Skredsvig lived in Paris between 1879 and 1885. In the Salon of 1880 he was awarded a gold medal for Ferme à Venoix which was purchased by the French State. On his return to Norway he and his wife settled in Fleskum in Baerum, and it was there during the summer of 1886 that Skredsvig was joined by his contemporaries Harriet Backer, Kitty Kielland, Gerhard Munther, Eilif Pettersen and Erik Werenskiold. Working side by side on Skredsvig's farm the group developed many of the themes and painting techniques that they had learnt when they were together in Munich and Paris, and produced during that summer some of the freshest, most evocative and memorable images of the Norwegian landscape.

The development of Skredsvig's neo-romantic style in his work typically centred on the presence of a lone figure at one with himself and nature within a lush landscape setting as evident in The Sallow Flute of 1889, one of his most well known compositions (fig. 1). The present work takes up this theme again a few years later when he had left his wife and moved from Fleskum to Eggedal. There he met and fell in love with a young girl 23 years his junior, Beret Knudsdatter Holt, whom he later married. Poésie norvegienne is Skredvig's ode both to his new wife and to the Norwegian landscape with which he had developed such a profound affinity.

Extremely well received when it was exhibited at the second Venice Biennale in 1897 (fig. 2), Skredsvig painted another version of the present work a year later.