LARS HERTERVIG IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

A Collaboration with Stavanger Art Museum

In an ongoing collaboration with Stavanger Art Museum, the Nordic Institute of Art will focus on the oeuvre of Lars Hertervig in a national and international context. Through exhibitions, publications, scholarship and seminars, we aim at cooperation with especially academic and curatorial communities, including museums and other research institutions.

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902) grew up on the island of Borgøy on the south-west coast of Norway, a landscape which would become a recurring theme in Hertervig’s art. At an early stage, he moved with his family to the city of Stavanger, where he became a painter’s apprentice. Hertervig attended the Royal Drawing School in Christiania (today’s Oslo), before moving to Düsseldorf in the early 1850s to study under the Norwegian painter Hans Fredrik Gude, who was a professor at the Art Academy. Hertervig’s works emerge from a romantic tradition while offering a personal and at times unsettling interpretation of nature.

Hertervig was diagnosed with mental illness and faced marginalisation from society and the art world; however, he continued to create visionary landscapes, often working in isolation on his home island of Borgøya, and in Stavanger. His alleged "madness" liberated him from conventional artistic norms, allowing him to develop experimental styles that we may claim positioned him within the early avant-garde of Modern art.

Although he is recognized in Norway as a central nineteenth-century artist, he remains relatively overlooked internationally. Through our ongoing project, the Nordic Institute of Art and Stavanger Art Museum aim to bring greater visibility to Hertervig's contributions and ensuring his legacy resonates not only nationally, but also in the wider world.

Stavanger Art Museum holds a major collection of Hertervig’s works, featuring some 70 pieces, including paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Important holdings also reside in the National Museum, Oslo, and KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes in Bergen.

Lars Hertervig, Old Pine Trees (1865),

Stavanger Kunstmuseum
Photo: Myrestrand, Dag / Stavanger Kunstmuseum