ArtistNorwegian
Henrik Sørensen
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Henrik Ingvar Sorensen (1882-1962) was born in Fryksande, Sweden, to Norwegian parents, and grew up to become one of the most ambitious and wide-ranging painters in Norwegian art of the twentieth century. He studied under Christian Krohg in Oslo before leaving for Paris, where between 1908 and 1910 he worked directly with Henri Matisse. That contact came at a formative moment in Matisse's own career, and Sorensen absorbed a sense of color as structural force rather than decorative supplement, a lesson that would shape his work across the many different modes he would go on to explore.
His breakthrough came with Svartbaekken in 1908. Two years later, Varieteartist (1910) made headlines and was purchased by Prince Eugen of Sweden, himself a painter and one of the more discerning collectors of Nordic art in his generation. The early work showed a confident, colorful expressionism, but Sorensen was never content to remain in a single register. Over the following decades he moved between landscape, portraiture, religious painting, and large-scale decorative composition, responding to subjects, the light above Telemark's hills, figures in interiors, scenes of labor and celebration, with a flexibility that made him difficult to categorize and easy to underestimate.
The Telemark region became central to his identity. He settled there and its landscape runs through his work as a consistent thread: forested valleys, open skies, the particular quality of Norwegian light in different seasons. Works like Night in Telemark, held in the Nasjonalmuseet, show how he could bring an almost Romantic feeling for nature into formal contact with the color lessons of the Parisian avant-garde without resolving the tension too neatly.
His largest commissions placed him at the intersection of art and civic life. He painted decorations for Ulleval Hospital in Oslo and an altarpiece for Linkoping Cathedral in Sweden. His most significant public achievement was his contribution to Oslo City Hall, where his enormous oil painting covering the main hall, depicting work, administration, and celebration in Norwegian life, was advertised at its completion as the world's largest oil painting, measuring more than 13 by 23 meters. The work was created between the late 1930s and 1950 alongside other major Norwegian painters including Alf Rolfsen and Per Krohg, with the project interrupted by the Second World War.
Sorensen's auction market is concentrated almost entirely at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which accounts for 92 of the 94 lots recorded on this platform. The top recorded sale, Badende gutter from 1913, reached 480,000 NOK, followed by Fra Syden, Portofino at 400,000 NOK and Portrett av Laura Broch at 350,000 NOK. The price range for his work is wide, but figurative early works and his Telemark subjects command the strongest results.