‘The longer I stood gazing at the scene the more I seemed to feel what a solitary pitiful atom I was in an endless universe…It was as if I had suddenly awakened in a new, unimagined and inexplicable world.’
Winter Night in the Mountains is arguably the most famous painted landscape in, and of, Norway, both an icon of the country’s pristine natural beauty and a powerful expression of the feelings which the landscape invokes in the artist’s mind. Inspired by the Rondane mountains, which Sohlberg first visited on a skiing trip in 1899, the composition pre-occupied him for over a quarter of a century, and gave rise to a series of iterations in oil and watercolour. The present work, one of just a handful of finished watercolours, has remained in the artist’s family since it was executed. Through the black silhouettes of gnarled and blasted trees and across the Langglup valley rise the silent rounded snow-covered peaks of the Rondeslottet and the Høgronden against a dark azure sky punctuated by a lone star.
Sohlberg completed an initial oil painting of the composition in 1901 (which he never exhibited), while also working on the larger, definitive oil version now in the National Museum, Oslo – a painting on which he worked for almost fifteen years before considering it complete and fit for exhibition in 1914. It was shown at the Jubilee Exhibition (marking the centenary of Norway’s constitution) in Kristiania (Oslo), at which it was bought for 10,000 kroner by Norwegian shipowner, businessman and collector Jørgen Breder Stang, who lent it to the International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 (at which it won a gold medal) before donating it to the National Museum in 1918. The present work, from 1911, provides a fascinating insight into the artist’s developing thoughts on, and ambitions for, the 1914 oil.
From 1900-1902 Sohlberg set up home in Rondane. In the summer of 1901 his 23 year-old fiancée Lilly Hennum joined him there, and returned with him after their marriage in Oslo that autumn. Thereafter, Sohlberg returned to Rondane for shorter visits in 1911 and 1913. Throughout this time, he continued to focus his thoughts on the composition, taking photographs and sketches, and making a series of finished studies, including this one. Whereas his earliest watercolour studies from 1900 were more narrative and self-referential, often featuring skiers in the foreground in awe of the view (as he had been only a year earlier), by 1911 they were devoid of human presence and pared down almost to abstraction. Following the positive response to the painting shown at the Jubilee Exhibition, Sohlberg began work on the polychrome lithograph of the composition, his most ambitious print project; and in the 1920s worked on a third oil version, featuring a red fox in the foreground, sold in these rooms in 1987 and now in a private collection.
Winter Night in the Mountains epitomises Sohlberg’s startlingly modernist aesthetic, blending a Romantic perception of nature with a contemporary pictorial language and personal meaning akin to Symbolism. The influence of the German and Norwegian Romantic tradition, in particular the work of Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl, is unmistakable both in the construction of the composition and, up to a point, in the use of landscape as a vehicle for expressing pious thought. Øivind Storm Bjerke has pointed out that Sohlberg, while working on the composition, turned from atheism or agnosticism to religion. In this and indeed the 1914 oil, for instance, the geological feature of two intersecting crevasses high up on Høgronden, visible from the artist’s vantage point at Nesset, are given the form of a cross. Certainly, through this detail Sohlberg is powerfully conveying his Romantic, quasi-religious reaction before the sublime scale of nature, which he experienced with
‘Such intensity, that one feels so extremely tiny and imperfect and ignorant, that one remains standing, humble as if during the most moving devotions.’
However, this overt nod to the Romantics is just one sign embedded in a far broader personal vision and symbolism, inspired by and embodying the stemningsmaleri or 'mood-painting' which characterised Nordic art at the close of the nineteenth century. While the Romantics expressed the idea through their subject matter, the Symbolists (whose work Sohlberg would have seen during his study trip to Paris in 1895-6) sought to express themselves by means of the work of art itself, using colour, form, and suggestive double images. Sohlberg’s aesthetic must also be viewed in the context of the work and influence of contemporary poets, composers, and writers at home, including Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, Edvard Grieg, and Henrik Ibsen. Grieg set Vinje’s poem, Vid Rundarne - in which the last rays of sunlight on the snowy mountains remind the poet of times past and the need to find refuge in the night - to music in 1880; and Henrik Ibsen in Brand uses the ascent of a mountain as a symbol of liberation and the sublime.
Sohlberg’s abstracted landscape is redolent with meaning and the workings of his mind. To convey the intensity of colours in nature and the powerful impression they left on him, he exaggerated the dominant colour, in this case blue. Against this immersive backdrop, through natural suggestion the painter explores contradictory myriad feelings of awe, fear, and desire that the landscape impels in him. While ostensibly stripped of human staffage, presences are hinted at through the vegetal, mineral, and even the cosmic: the trees take on the forms of skeletal figures:
‘Before me in the far distance rose a range of mountains, beautiful and majestic in the moonlight. Like petrified giants.’
The extends to the mineral world – on first visiting Rondane, his first impression of the mountains was of ‘petrified giants’, but as he spent more time contemplating them they metamorphosed in his mind, the rounded sensual peaks of the mountains suggestive of the curves of a female body. Given the concomitance of Sohlberg’s first trip to Rondane and his engagement and marriage to Lilly, could the mountain silhouette be read as the form of a recumbent woman? In conjunction with the prominence of Venus, the planet of love, in the night sky, the painting takes on an ever more personal meaning.
‘I saw deformed, gnarled and overturned trees, mute expressions of inconceivably strong forces of Nature, of the might and rage of storms.’
Throughout his career Sohlberg was regularly compared with his illustrious compatriot Edvard Munch. While this was no doubt to his credit, Sohlberg consistently denied being influenced by Munch, six years his senior. Superficially their style is rather different: Sohlberg's precise, accomplished draughtsmanship - magnificently deployed in the present work - is clearly at odds with the expressive brushstroke and angst-filled canvases of his compatriot. Yet as Øivind Storm Bjerke has argued, 'both Munch and Sohlberg helped to establish a trend towards simplified palettes dominated by just one or a few colours - frequently white, black, blue, red or green - which helped to emphasise atmosphere and mood'. An exhibition exploring the artists' relationship was held in New York in 1995, titled Munch/Sohlberg: Landscapes of the Mind.
