Lars Hertervig

Norway’s largest and most important collection of works by Lars Hertervig (1830-1902) is at Stavanger Art Museum.
As one of Norway’s most significant artists, Hertervig made a highly original contribution to Norwegian romantic landscape painting.

In landscapes from Sunnhordland and Ryfylke which he painted in the 1850s, he appears as a remarkable representative of the Düsseldorf School in Norwegian art history. Due to mental illness, Hertervig lost legal majority in 1858. He also lost financial support and contact with artistic milieus. He nevertheless continued to paint. During 1865 – 1867, he had the means to buy relatively large canvases and oil paint. This resulted in a series of contemplative depictions of primeval forests, fjords and chalk-white fair-weather clouds floating in a clear blue sky.

Throughout his entire artistic practice, Hertervig worked with watercolour and gouache on paper. He initially treated these pictures as studies, but from 1867 to 1902 he only produced works on paper. Landscapes bathed in light appear on tobacco paper, but there are also painting surfaces he made himself by combining wallpaper, newspaper and packaging material. For some of these, he used the seams between the materials as part of the landscape composition. The way he combined colours with the materiality of paper is unparalleled in Norwegian art history.