ArtistNorwegian
August Jacobsen
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August Julius Jacobsen was born on 9 September 1868 in Stavanger, a port city on Norway's southwest coast that in the late nineteenth century produced a loose circle of painters drawn to the flat coastal landscape of Jæren. His path to painting was indirect: at sixteen he was sent to Germany to train as a photographer, and it was only after transferring the family photography business to his brother in 1892 that he turned fully to art and departed for Paris.
In Paris he studied under Fernand Cormon, whose large atelier on the Boulevard de Clichy had trained Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec among many others, before moving to Alfred Philippe Roll, a painter of figures and rural labor whose solid academic grounding gave Jacobsen a firm technical base. He returned repeatedly to Copenhagen, studying under Kristian Zahrtmann during the winters of 1895-1896 and again in 1899. Through the sculptor Jacob Sømme he was introduced to the Jærkolonien circle, a loosely affiliated group of Norwegian painters including Kitty Kielland, Eilif Peterssen, Gudmund Stenersen, and Bernhard Hinna who gathered around the open landscapes and coastal light of Jæren. This milieu shaped his mature subject matter.
Jacobsen painted landscapes, interiors, and portraits in a manner informed by French Impressionism filtered through Norwegian sensibility. He was drawn to specific places: the treescapes near Kristiansand, coastal farmsteads, views of Stavanger with its multiple church towers. A state travel stipend in 1904, arranged partly on the advice of Kitty Kielland, took him to Italy, and a later trip produced his Morgen i Granada from 1920. He painted portraits of notable contemporaries including Kitty Kielland herself, Olaf Storm, Jeanette Storm, and Hans L. Falck. His works entered the collections of the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, Stavanger Kunstmuseum (Rogaland Art Museum), and the State Museum for Art in Copenhagen.
He died in Stavanger on 28 January 1955, aged 86, having spent most of his life in the city where he was born. His career spans the transition from late nineteenth-century naturalism through Impressionism, and his long life gave him unusual perspective on those shifts. On the Auctionist platform, 14 items by Jacobsen have appeared at auction across four houses - Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, Palsgaard Kunstauktioner, Garpenhus Auktioner, and Bukowskis Stockholm. The strongest result was Fra Tresse i Kristiansand at NOK 35,000, followed by two works at NOK 30,000 each: Utsikt med fire kirker, Stavanger, and Interiør 1904. His auction prices reflect solid regional demand among Scandinavian collectors of nineteenth and early twentieth-century realism.