Frits Thaulow

Biography

In 1888 Frits Thaulow served sixty days in prison for striking Amandus Schibsted, the owner and editor of the newspaper Aftenposten. For a Norwegian painter who was forty and already regarded as one of the leading figures of the capital’s art world, it is a strange episode.

He was born on 20 October 1847 in Christiania, the son of a pharmacist, Harald Conrad Thaulow; his mother, Nicoline Munch, was the daughter of the painter Jacob Munch. At baptism he was named Johan Frederik. He studied at the Academy of Art in Copenhagen in 1870–1872 under the marine painter Carl Frederik Sørensen, and then in 1873–1875 in Karlsruhe under Hans Gude. For that reason Thaulow began with seascapes.

In 1879, together with his friend Christian Krohg, he sailed in a small boat from Norway to Skagen, in the north of Jutland, where the first artists had been arriving even before the well-known colony took shape. Krohg persuaded him to stay for the summer and autumn. There Thaulow, who had previously painted the sea, turned to the fishermen and boats on the shore. His years in Paris, where he lived for the most part until 1880, brought him acquaintance with the French Impressionists, and their influence on his development was great.

In 1880 he came home a convinced naturalist. Together with Krohg and Erik Werenskiold he quickly became one of the leaders of the young artists who were fighting for a broader and freer Norwegian art scene. In 1882 they organised the first Autumn Exhibition (Høstutstillingen), which has been held annually ever since. In the early 1880s Thaulow took the initiative in setting up the so-called “Open-Air Academy” at the Haugfossen waterfall in Modum: there, with several younger artists, among them Kalle Løchen, Gustav Wentzel and Edvard Munch, he refined his naturalist manner. In Christiania he painted cityscapes, always in the open air, with passers-by in the streets, and winter views with snow. Many of his best-known Norwegian motifs are connected with Åsgårdstrand, where artists had been gathering since the 1880s.

In 1892 Thaulow settled in France. The cityscapes of Paris did not suit him, and his best pictures were made in small towns: Montreuil-sur-Mer (1892–1894), Dieppe and the surrounding villages (1894–1898), Quimperlé in Brittany (1901) and Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne in the Corrèze département (1903). One of his best-known French works is called “A Village Street in France”. In Dieppe he and his wife Alexandra became friends with the painter Charles Conder and met Aubrey Beardsley. In 1898, after a trip to the United States, he settled permanently in Paris. Those said to have collected his paintings include the composer Claude Debussy and the Americans Andrew Carnegie and Randolph Hearst; Thaulow was also reproached, however, for painting “postcards” to a ready formula. For Norway, his fame abroad was almost unparalleled: after his death Georg Brandes wrote that, after Grieg, Ibsen, Bjørnson and Nansen, no Norwegian had made the name of the country so widely known.

Thaulow was honoured with orders in several countries. In 1892 he became a knight of the Order of St. Olav, and in 1905 a commander of the second class. He was also an officer of the French Legion of Honour, and was awarded the Italian Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus and the Tunisian Order of Nichan Iftikhar.

Thaulow died on 5 November 1906 in Volendam in the Netherlands, where he had gone to paint. Two years later his widow published a collection of his surviving manuscripts and letters, “I Kamp og i Fest” (“In Struggle and in Festivity”). Today 37 of his works are held by the National Gallery of Norway; there are also paintings in the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv and in the Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art.