Frits Thaulow

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 24 March 1988, lot 231;

Where purchased by a private collector, Maryland.

The artist’s granddaughter, Alexandra Thaulow, has identified the setting of this autumnal landscape as the island of Stord, near Bergen, due south of Lyngdal on Norway’s west coast. Thaulow visited the island frequently, and even lived there for a year from October 1888 to September 1889 while preparing paintings for submission to the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle.

Thaulow studied at the Copenhagen Academy and at the Baden School of Art in Karlsruhe before spending time in Paris in the 1870s where he admired the work of Jules Bastein-Lepage as well as the ‘new painting’ (later coined Impressionism) taking hold in the French capital. The tenets of both French Naturalism and Impressionism are clearly evident in his style, which was further shaped by his personal French connections. Thaulow and Paul Gauguin were brothers-in-law through the marriage of Thaulow’s sister Ingeborg to Gauguin. Through Gauguin, Thaulow no doubt encountered the work Vincent van Gogh, echoes of whose landscapes can be felt in the present work; while Thaulow and Claude Monet were also close friends, the former inviting the latter to Norway in 1895 to paint the winter landscapes there.

During the 1880s and early 1890s, Thaulow painted throughout Norway, but moved back to France in 1892. That same year he became - along with Auguste Rodin, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Alfred Roll, Carolus-Duran and Jacques-Emile Blanche – the co-founder of the Salon du Champ de Mars (the forerunner of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts) as a reaction against the conservative policies and attitudes of the traditional Salon.

This work has been requested for a Frits Thaulow exhibition which will be held at the Haugar Art Museum, Oslo in collaboration with the Kode Art Museum, Bergen from 20 September 2025 until 4 January 2026.