KunstenaarNorwegian
Christian Skredsvig
0 actieve items
Christian Erichsen Skredsvig was born on 12 March 1854 on the Skredsvig farm in Modum, Buskerud, and died on 19 January 1924. His formation as a painter stretched across three countries over more than a decade. At fifteen he entered Johan Fredrik Eckersberg's drawing school in Christiania, and after Eckersberg's death he continued under Julius Middelthun at the National Academy of Craft and Art Industry. From 1870 to 1874 he studied landscape painting in Copenhagen under Vilhelm Kyhn at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, before relocating to Munich in 1875 and then to Paris.
Paris proved decisive. Skredsvig studied under Léon Bonnat and immersed himself in the plein-air practice then reshaping European painting. In 1881 he became the only Norwegian artist to win the gold medal at the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, for his painting Une ferme à Venoix. He spent the first half of the 1880s absorbing the influence of French Naturalism, absorbing how light, time of day, and seasonal atmosphere could carry the emotional weight of a composition, without fully aligning himself with the Impressionists.
Returning to Norway in 1886, he settled at the Fleskum farm in Bærum. That summer became a watershed moment in Norwegian art history. Skredsvig and his peers, Eilif Peterssen, Kitty Kielland, Harriet Backer, Erik Werenskiold, gathered around the farm and produced canvases where evening light, still water, and summer twilight took on a mood distinct from the objectivity of Naturalism. Art historians mark this summer as the beginning of Norwegian Neo-Romanticism. Skredsvig's Seljefløiten (The Willow Flute, 1889), painted beside Lake Dælivannet, became one of its defining images: a boy playing a willow flute in a luminous, hushed landscape where the border between the seen and the felt seems deliberately soft.
He also made extended trips to Corsica in 1888 and southern France in 1891, and continued drawing on the valley landscapes of Eggedal for motifs throughout his later career. Works such as Idyll (1888) and Jupsjøen (1904) extended his characteristic approach, close attention to natural light combined with a quiet, elegiac sensibility. In addition to painting, Skredsvig wrote his autobiography Dage og Nætter blandt Kunstnere (Days and Nights Among Artists, 1908), as well as novels. His home at Fleskum became a museum in 1970, preserving his studio, his collection, and works by friends who visited over the decades.
At auction, Skredsvig appears almost exclusively at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which accounts for 85 of his 88 documented auction appearances on Auctionist. His market is concentrated but strong at the high end. The top recorded sale is Golden Clouds. Evening on the lake (1892) at 3,400,000 NOK, followed by Blaastuen, Fleskum (1890) and Boy with a Fishing Rod by the Shores of Daelivannet (1889), each reaching 1,200,000 NOK. The results confirm sustained demand for his atmospheric lakeside and landscape compositions from the 1888 to 1892 period.