14 June 2019 - Harald Sohlberg 150 Years

Duality is present in Sohlberg’s art – his images are both mystical and sobering. Still summer-night motifs describe nature’s beauty, but they can also evoke concern. His colourful paintings appeal to intuition and feelings.  They take on the hidden contexts between the outer, sensible world and humans’ inner being. In many of his landscape paintings, the absence of humans is conspicuous because the paintings also contain traces of human activity, such as homes, roads and telegraph poles.

Harald Sohlberg was born in Oslo and apprenticed under Sven Jørgensen, Kristian Zahrtmann in Copenhagen, Erik Werenskiold and Harriet Backer. He studied in Paris and Weimar between 1895 and 1897 and was quick to join the young neo-romantics who opposed everyday naturalism.

The span between traditional beliefs and modern life make his pictorial world special in both Norwegian and international contexts. His motifs and technique distinguish him from his contemporaries, but also make him unique and forever relevant.

In his famous Winter Night in Rondane (1914) – also called Winter Night in the Mountains – Sohlberg sought to give the synthesis of his intense nature experience, expressed by strict drawing and an enamel-like glaze technique that added a soft glow. The motif is undoubtedly Sohlberg’s most well-known – and he made it in several versions, including as an oil painting and a colour lithograph

Facts

Number: NK 2009-2010
Motif: "Self-Portrait", "Street in Røros, 1902", "Street in Røros, 1903"
Design: Camilla Kvien Jensen
Denomination: NOK 26.00 - NOK 45.00
Issued in: Sheet of 50 stamps
Print run: 1,055,000 stamps
Print: Offset from Joh. Enschedé Security Print, The Netherlands