Rolf Juell Gleditsch

The Paris years left a clear mark. In the early 1920s Gleditsch produced canvases that show direct engagement with French Cubism, breaking motifs into flattened geometric planes while retaining recognizable landscape subjects. Works from this period, including 'Viadukt ved Meudon' (1919) and 'Gate i Cagnes' (1921) and 'From Assisi, Italy' (1920), were painted during or shortly after his time in France and demonstrate how attentively he absorbed the formal experiments then circulating in Parisian studios. 'Viadukt ved Meudon' depicts the famous railway viaduct near Paris with angular, interlocking planes, while 'Gate i Cagnes' captures a sunlit street in the village on the Cote d'Azur that Renoir had made famous.

Over the following decade Gleditsch's style evolved away from strict Cubist fragmentation toward what might be called a broad, lightly stylized naturalism - forms simplified and weighted, colour atmospheric rather than purely chromatic. In 1933 he found the subject matter that would define the rest of his career: the old copper-mining town of Røros in central Norway. With its ochre timber houses, high-altitude light, and surrounding river valleys, Røros offered precisely the kind of landscape that suited his mature palette. He never settled permanently in the town but returned every spring and autumn for nearly five decades, building up an unusually sustained body of work from a single place.

Works such as 'Ljungan ved Torpshammar' (1931), 'Strandefjord Valdres' (1924), 'Hitterelva, Røros', and 'Glåma ved Røros Gård' chart the geography of this commitment - river bends, farmsteads, winter light. He also produced woodcuts, several of which entered the collection of the National Gallery of Norway (Nasjonalgalleriet) in Oslo alongside his painting 'Under Galdhøe' (1939). His very long working life - he died on 13 January 1984 at the age of 91 - gave him the unusual position of a painter trained in pre-war European modernism whose career stretched into the 1980s.

At auction, Gleditsch's work appears almost exclusively through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which accounts for all 11 lots in the Auctionist database. The top realized price in our records is 20,000 NOK for 'Gate i Cagnes' (1921), followed by 13,000 NOK for 'Viadukt ved Meudon' (1919), both from his Cubist-influenced French period. Norwegian landscapes from the Røros years tend to sell in the 2,800-8,500 NOK range, suggesting that collectors place a premium on the more experimental early work. His market remains primarily domestic.