Peter Nicolai Arbo

Biography

In 1858 the publisher Christian Tønsberg commissioned Arbo to make drawings of a large Norwegian-Swedish military exercise at Axvall. Ten lithographs were made from the drawings: the camp, a bivouac, a Midsummer Eve entertainment, field duty, the parade.

Among the early works of the young artist these are not paintings but illustrations, and he went back to that kind of work all his life.

Arbo grew up at Gulskogen Manor, beside the Drammen River, in what is now Drammen. His father, Christian Fredrik Arbo, was a headmaster, and his mother was Marie Christiane von Rosen. His older brother Carl Oscar Eugen became a military doctor and one of the first Norwegian anthropologists. Sources differ on his birthplace: by some accounts he was born at Gulskogen, by others at Skoger. He began his art training in 1851–1852 at Frederik Helsted’s drawing school in Copenhagen. He then went to Düsseldorf and studied at the academy: from 1853 to 1855 under Karl Ferdinand Sohn, professor of figure painting, and in 1857–1858 under Emil Hünten, a painter of battles and animals. With Hünten he worked especially on horses and became a good painter of animals. For a time he was a private pupil of the history painter Otto Mengelberg, had contact with Adolph Tidemand, and became friends with Hans Gude, from whom he rented lodgings for several years. Both taught at the academy, and Arbo is usually counted as part of the Düsseldorf school.

In 1861 he returned to Norway, and the following year he travelled through the country on a study trip with Gude and Frederik Collett. In 1863 he painted the first version of “Horse Flock on the High Mountains”. He took up the subject several times, and the version of 1889, kept in the National Museum in Oslo, is considered one of his most important works.

From 1863 to 1871 Arbo lived mostly in Paris. There, in 1864 or 1865, he painted the first “Valkyrie”; it was shown in Stockholm in 1866, and the Swedish king Charles XV bought it. It is now in the National Museum in Stockholm. The second “Valkyrie” (1869) is in the National Gallery in Oslo. In the same year, 1866, Arbo became a Knight of the Norwegian Order of St. Olav and of the Swedish Order of Vasa. Historical subjects include “The Fall of St. Olav at the Battle of Stiklestad” (1859), “Haakon the Good” (1860), “Sverre’s Crossing of the Mountains at Voss” (1861), “The Battle of Stamford Bridge” (1870) and “Gisle Challenges the Huns to Single Combat” (1886). His best-known work, “The Wild Hunt of Odin” (“Åsgårdsreien”, 1872), based on a Norse legend, is in the National Gallery in Oslo. Arbo also painted portraits; his sitters included Christian Boeck, Robert Collett, Andreas Christian Conradi and Marcus Jacob Monrad.

Book illustration held a notable place in his work. In 1860 Tønsberg published “Pictures from the History of Norway”, based on a short version of Peter Andreas Munch’s history of the Norwegian people: Arbo made three watercolours for the issue, among them the arrival of Olav Tryggvason in Norway and the fall of St. Olav at Stiklestad. Conceived as a large publication, it came out in a single issue because of the publisher’s financial difficulties. In 1879 Arbo supplied eleven drawings for “Pictures for the History of Norway for School and Home”, in which he used some of the work left unpublished for Tønsberg. In the same year two of his drawings appeared in the two-volume edition of the folktales of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe: one for “Peer Gynt” and one for the tale of the giant and Johannes Blessom.

Around 1870–1871 Arbo settled in Christiania and became director of the art school. He served as a juror at exhibitions in Stockholm in 1866 and Philadelphia in 1876, and in 1873 was in charge of the art department at the World’s Fair in Vienna. From 1875 he was a member of the National Gallery Company, and from 1882 until his death he directed the Art Society of Christiania. In 1882 he married the artist Eliza Thomas, who was twenty-three years younger, at Meudon near Paris; they settled in Christiania on Oscarsgate.

Arbo died in Christiania on 14 October 1892. In Drammen, his family home at Gulskogen is part of the Drammen Museum of Art and Cultural History, where some of his works are shown.