ArtistNorwegianb.1898–d.1981
Ridley Borchgrevink
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A giraffe swaying with seasickness. Ostriches caught mid-dance. Crocodiles half-submerged in the Kenyan heat. Ridley Borchgrevink spent decades watching animals in motion and finding the exact line that captured what was alive in them.
He was born in Wimbledon in 1898, the son of the Norwegian polar explorer Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink, who had led one of the first expeditions to overwinter on the Antarctic continent. The family moved to Norway in 1902. There is something fitting in the trajectory: a father who mapped the edges of the earth, a son who spent his life drawing what lived at those edges.
Borchgrevink studied architecture for a year at NTH in Trondheim in 1918 and then switched to zoology at the University of Oslo - a combination that would prove formative. Scientific attention to structure, artistic hunger for the living thing. Between 1920 and 1923 he was in Paris, studying with Othon Friesz, Raoul Dufy, Andre Lhote and Pedro Araujo. He debuted at Høstutstillingen in Oslo in 1921 and went on to participate almost every year until 1972.
In 1924 he made a round-the-world voyage with stops in Southeast Asia and the West Indies. Then came the African expeditions that defined his reputation: Morocco first, then Kenya in 1931-1932 and again in 1947-1948, with a journey to Uganda during the second stay. The 1931-32 trip directly preceded his book 'Svart og hvitt i Afrika' (1932), in which he both wrote the text and drew its animals - dancing ostriches, lurking crocodiles, cheeky monkeys - in the quick, precise pencil and pen strokes he had made his own. The book was a popular success.
His second African book, 'Dyrespor og vill honning' (1950), recounted the 1947-48 journey in the Kenyan bush during the early Mau Mau period, this time with a drawing style that had grown leaner and more concentrated on outline. Between these two books he illustrated around 30 works for other Norwegian authors, most significantly the writer Mikkjel Fønhus, for whom he drew the moose plates in 'Trollelgen' (1947) - images that became inseparable from how a generation of Norwegians pictured the animal.
His drawings were always made from observation. Whether in Nordmarka, Rondane, India, or East Africa, Borchgrevink sketched on the spot. The National Museum holds multiple works including 'Hvit egretthegre' (1928), 'Lion and Zebra', 'Duck', and 'Ox and Cow'; his work is also in the collections of the Bergen Picture Gallery, Drammen Gallery, Trondheim Permanent Gallery, and Stavanger. He received the State Artist's Salary (Statens kunstnerlonn) from 1958 and was awarded the King's Medal of Merit in gold. He died in Asker in 1981.
On Auctionist, Borchgrevink's work appears primarily through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner and Nyborgs Auksjoner, concentrated in drawings. The top result in our database is 'Head of a Giraffe 1933' at NOK 22,000, followed by 'Dachs hvalper' at NOK 5,500 and 'Troll-elg illustrasjoner' at NOK 4,200.