Beloved Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup emerges from obscurity

It says something of the deep obscurity into which the Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup fell – after his death in 1928 aged 47 – that neither the Dulwich Picture Gallery director, Ian Dejardin, nor the British art historian MaryAnne Stevens had heard of him until a few years ago. Their exhibition devoted to Astrup at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London will be one of the first major showcases of his work outside his own country.

Yet as Dejardin and Stevens travelled to Jølstravatnet, the remote lake in northwest Norway where the artist spent most of his life, a fellow passenger’s face lit up in instant recognition of their blurry photocopies of his work. “Astrup!” she said. “You know he is our hero in Norway.”

The images, the passenger said, were so ubiquitous – hanging in schools, public buildings, in her mother’s, aunts’ and grandmother’s homes – that as a teenager she grew bored of them. But after living abroad, she came to love his contorted rocks and trees, shimmering lakes, flowers spilling like lava down mountainsides, dark threatening forests and bonfires blazing in the eerie light of a midsummer night.

Stevens was astonished when she first encountered Astrup’s work on a visit to Norway while researching another artist.

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“I feel a kind of missionary zeal about Astrup,” she says. “He is so very good, so distinctive, so sure of himself and the experience he wants you to share in his work. He is not just a naturalistic landscape painter. He was fully aware of what was happening in contemporary art, the work of the neo-Impressionists, the expressionists and the cubists, but he decides to turn his back on it and devote his life to painting Norway.”