Dulwich Shows It's Not So Grim Up North

There's no denying the attraction of the light and warmth of the south. Just look at Pierre Bonnard at Tate Modern: all those gorgeous yellows and oranges and ochres. Granted, the weather's rather less congenial in northern Europe, but when the sun or the moon is right, or there's snow on the ground, that northern light can be just as bright and fascinating for the artist, just as seductive, as the Mediterranean.

Not convinced? Get down to Dulwich Picture Gallery and discover Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway. Because Norwegian painting isn't just The Scream. Edvard Munch's world-famous image isn't the painting that defines the nation. That picture is by Sohlberg; it's called Winter Night in the Mountains, and it forms the climax of this superb exhibition in south-east London.

There won't have been many Britons who will have known anything at all about Sohlberg before learning of this show. After all, who in continental Europe knows about LS Lowry or Stanley Spencer? Luckily, the National Gallery in Oslo has just closed to prepare for a move to the new National Museum opening next year, and so London gets to see a show that's already been on in the Norwegian capital to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of the country's greatest landscape painters.

We're in the forest. Through the trees you can glimpse a cottage, with a lake or perhaps a fjord beyond. The sun pierces the denseness of the woods, casting strange shadows on the path that leads down to the house that look like dancing people, or perhaps spirits of the kind to be found in Scandinavian folk tales. This is Sun Gleam, an early painting by Sohlberg from 1894, and one of the first pictures you see as you make your way round.

It's an emotional and Symbolist response to this Nordic landscape, and this approach will be seen throughout Sohlberg's career, even as his style changes.

Summer Night, from just before the turn of the century, represents a key motif. The view is from the balcony of Sohlberg's apartment looking across the Oslo Fjord. The table is laid for two, in a scene thought to commemorate the artist's engagement. The eye is drawn towards the immensity of the horizon and the night sky. Where are the happy couple, though? The picture gives plenty of signs of life, but the humans are just not there. Sohlberg's landscapes and townscapes are largely unpopulated, as a rule.  

But here is the artist, as seen by himself in 1896, a rare portrait in a show in which men and women are largely relegated to the smallest of supporting roles.

There's a hypnotic look in Sohlberg's eyes, and there's a hypnotic, and somewhat other-worldly, look too to some of the paintings he made. Flower Meadow in the North draws you in past the meticulously painted daisies in the foreground, so real you feel you could pick one, that blur into a mass of white in the middle ground, across the trees and the river and up the hill to the moon lying low over the horizon. 

In 1902, Sohlberg moved to the mining town of Røros, producing strangely empty townscapes of the brightly painted wooden houses in deep snow under heavy clouds that proclaim a fresh fall is imminent. He later said he wanted to paint workers in a town that was rapidly industrialising but found none.

Street in Røros in Winter is typical: It's reminiscent of a 17th-century Dutch cityscape in its detail and precision, though while a Dutch painter might have dotted the streets with traders and housewives, Sohlberg's Røros has the air of the Marie Celeste.

That feeling is even stronger in another work, Courtyard in Slush at Røros, where the door to a shed stands open, an axe has been left in the chopping-block, and a barrow and sled sit as if the inhabitants of the farm have just fled.

As Sohlberg's career progressed, though, the depiction of minute detail gave way to a greater attention to colour, mood and emotion. You can see this in some of his later works, with a moonlight blue playing a dominant role. Andante is a Norwegian Whistler Nocturne.

And the orange of the setting sun and its reflection on water comes to the fore too. Spring Evening, Akershus Fortress is a riot of colour as the day in Oslo draws to a close with the blue hills to the west. Another hypnotising image.

It's a wonderful show so far, but the final room is pretty special, with two breathtaking paintings (and several alternative versions of each: these were motifs Sohlberg painted again and again).

The first is Night, Røros Church. The church is silhouetted against the blue of the sky, the chimney of the town's copper smelting plant to the left and houses behind. But there's a big divide between you, the viewer, and that church, most of it taken up by a graveyard, empty of life, but filled with the dead. "I will not forget how forgotten and desolate this graveyard seemed to me and there was the church like a division between the homes of the living and the homes of the dead," Sohlberg wrote. "To give a kind of contradiction to how everything was forgotten and derelict I placed a new grave with roses in the foreground."

And then there's Winter Night in the Mountains. It's another hypnotic depict. Sohlberg was obsessed with this view of the Rondane range, which he first visited on a skiing trip in 1899, "I was almost overcome by a rush of emotion greater than I had ever experienced before,'' he said. "The longer I stood gazing at the scene the more I seemed to feel what a solitary and pitiful atom I was in an endless universe." These are the mountains in all their awe-inspiring majesty.

We can highly recommend this show, one of the best of the many we've seen at Dulwich. Do go.

Practicalities

Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway runs at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London until June 2. It's open from 1000 to 1700 from Tuesdays to Sundays and tickets cost £16.50, which also covers entry to the permanent collection. They can be bought online here. The gallery is about 10 minutes' walk from both West Dulwich station, for trains from Victoria, and North Dulwich station, for trains from London Bridge.

Images

Harald

Sohlberg,

Winter

Night

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the Mountains,

1914,

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National

Museum

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Art,

Architecture and

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Norway.

Harald Sohlberg, Sun Gleam, 1894, Gard forsikring, Arendal, Norway
Harald Sohlberg, Summer Night, 1899, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway
Harald Sohlberg, Self-Portrait, 1896, Private Collection
Harald Sohlberg, Flower Meadow in the North, 1905, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway
Harald Sohlberg, Street in Røros in Winter, 1903, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway
Harald Sohlberg, Spring Evening, Akershus Fortress, 1913, Akershus Fortress, Norway
Harald Sohlberg, Night, Røros Church, 1903, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway
Harald Sohlberg, Winter Night in the Mountains, 1914, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway