ArtistNorwegian
Gustav Wentzel
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Gustav Wentzel was born in 1859 as the eldest of seven children in a family that knew early hardship. His father, a farm owner and saddlemaker, went bankrupt while Wentzel was still a boy, leaving his mother to support the household by running a meat store. At fifteen he was apprenticed to a mason with the intention of becoming an architect, but that same year he began taking drawing lessons and changed direction entirely. Between 1875 and 1878 he studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry, then worked under the painter Knud Bergslien until 1880.
His career began taking shape through a confrontation with the institutional art world. An early painting, "Snekkersvennen" (A Carpenter's Workshop, 1881), a close, detailed image of a hunchbacked carpenter in his workplace, was rejected by the Christiania Kunstforening, the dominant exhibiting body. That rejection, combined with similar frustrations among younger Norwegian artists, helped push them toward organising their own exhibition. The first Høstutstillingen, Norway's annual Autumn Exhibition, opened in 1882, with Wentzel among those who helped bring it into being. He showed his interior "Frokost" (Breakfast) there, a large and quietly ambitious domestic scene that announced his intentions as a painter of everyday life without sentimentality.
In the early 1880s Wentzel travelled on the advice of the critic Andreas Aubert to Valdres, painting landscapes and rural interiors, before heading to Paris in 1883 to study with William Bouguereau at the Académie Julian. He returned to Paris on a state scholarship in 1888-1889 to study with Léon Bonnat and Alfred Philippe Roll. The Paris years reinforced his commitment to naturalism and close observation rather than pulling him toward the impressionist experiments gathering pace in the same studios and cafes. He remained attached to legible, finely worked surfaces and to subjects drawn from the lives of craftsmen, farming families, and domestic interiors.
After the family moved to Asker in the 1890s, Wentzel's subjects broadened. The outdoor life of the Oslo fjord hinterland, winter fields, sledding parties, ski competitions, entered his work. His painting of the skiing competition at Fjelkenbakken (1898) is one of his best-known outdoor works, catching the energy of a local competition with the same attentiveness he brought to interior scenes. He became close to the writer Arne Garborg and his wife Hulda during this period, and the Asker community gave his later work a quieter, rural quality distinct from his earlier urban interiors.
Wentzel received the Knight First Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 1908, a recognition of his sustained contribution to Norwegian cultural life. He died in 1927 in Lillehammer, where he had gone to hospital for treatment of an oral inflammation and contracted pneumonia. His wife, journalist and writer Kitty Wentzel, published her personal remembrances of him in a biography in 1956, reissued in 2009 on the 150th anniversary of his birth. The Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo holds a substantial group of his works, including "Frokost" (1882), "I fiskernaustet" (1881), "Dans i Setesdal" (1887), and multiple portraits and winter landscapes. At auction, his most significant recent sales include "Skiing competition in Fjelkenbakken, Asker" at 720,000 NOK, "Interior with breastfeeding Woman" (1893) at 180,000 NOK, and "On a sledge a sunny Day" (1911) at 180,000 NOK, all sold through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, which handles the great majority of his auction appearances.