ArtistNorwegianb.1830–d.1902
Lars Hertervig
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Lars Hertervig grew up in poverty on the island of Borgøy in Tysvær, on the west coast of Norway north of Stavanger, in a Quaker farming family. The landscape around him - the fjords, the archipelago, the light that shifts across water and stone - would define his work for the rest of his life. He traveled to Düsseldorf in 1852 and studied under Hans Gude at the Arts Academy, joining the current of the Düsseldorf school that shaped so much of nineteenth-century Scandinavian landscape painting. His early work from the 1850s, depicting scenes from Sunnhordland and Ryfylke, already set him apart: where most of his contemporaries sought picturesque documentation of Norwegian nature, Hertervig filtered what he saw through something more internal and unsettled.
In 1854, a prank by fellow students at the academy triggered a severe mental breakdown. He returned to the Stavanger region, and by 1856 he had been admitted to Gaustad psychiatric hospital. The diagnosis, in the language of the time, pointed to what would now likely be recognized as schizophrenia. He was discharged in 1858 and declared legally incapacitated, losing his state stipend and effectively his connection to the art establishment. For the next four decades he lived in extreme poverty, eventually ending his days in a poorhouse in Stavanger.
The paradox of Hertervig's life is that his most significant work came after the institutional world had turned its back on him. Between 1865 and 1867, he managed to paint a series of oil canvases that stand among the most unusual pictures made in Norway in the nineteenth century. Works like "The Tarn" (1865) and "View of Tysvær" (1867), now held in the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, show a painter working far outside the conventions of his time. The skies are luminous to the point of unreality; the forests are dense and primeval; the water surfaces mirror light with an intensity that tips the naturalistic into something approaching vision. Because he could not afford canvas or proper oil paint in his later years, he worked on whatever paper was at hand, and his unusual treatment of the support became, inadvertently, a distinctive part of his technique.
His artistic breakthrough came twelve years after his death, at the 1914 Jubilee Exhibition in Kristiania. Subsequent generations, including Norwegian expressionists and later modernists, found in his work a precedent for a kind of painting that refused the boundary between observation and psychological experience. The largest collection of his work is held at Stavanger Art Museum.
On the auction market, Hertervig's work appears primarily through Norwegian houses. In the Auctionist database, 19 works have been recorded, all handled through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner and Nyborgs Auksjoner. Top recorded sales include "Primeval Forest" at 370,000 NOK, "Sumplandskap med ryttere" at 275,000 NOK, and "Sailing Boats in heavy Sea" at 240,000 NOK. Internationally, a record of 787,510 USD was set at Blomqvist in 2008 for "Kveld", confirming sustained collector interest in his work well over a century after his death.