Theodor Kittelsen

Biography

In 1868, when his father, a merchant, died, Theodor was eleven. A widow with eight children was left in Kragerø, and the boy was sent to learn a trade: first with a watchmaker in his home town, then as a painter's apprentice in Christiania (now Oslo), from where he ran away home. Later he found himself with a watchmaker again, in Arendal.

There he was noticed by a lawyer, Diderich Maria Aall, chairman of the local art society. Aall organised a collection to pay for the gifted boy's education, and Kittelsen stayed on good terms with his patron for the rest of his life.

He was born on 27 April 1857 in Kragerø, the second of eight children. In 1874, at seventeen, he entered Wilhelm von Hanno's drawing school in Christiania and attended evening classes with Julius Middelthun. In 1876 he went to Munich, to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Wilhelm von Lindenschmit the Younger and Ludwig von Löfftz. There he became friends with Erik Werenskiold, Christian Skredsvig, Eilif Peterssen and other Norwegians. For the first three years Aall paid for Munich; then Kittelsen received a small scholarship, but in 1880 the money ran out and he returned to Kragerø. From his Munich years survives his first large oil painting, “Strike” (1879), based on a novel by Per Sivle; it was sold for a thousand kroner and shown at exhibitions in Christiania, Bergen, Gothenburg and Vienna. In Norwegian art history it is regarded as the first attempt at socially engaged painting. Munich also produced his first caricatures and his humanised animals.

From 1881 he worked as a fairy-tale illustrator. His first drawing to appear in print was “The Sea Troll”, for a tale by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. In 1882 Kittelsen did his military service, worked with Werenskiold on drawings at Tåtøy, near Kragerø, received a state scholarship and went to Paris, but stayed only briefly and without success. In the autumn of 1883 he returned to Munich, where his work appeared in German newspapers and magazines. Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe's “Book of Fairy Tales for Children” came out in three volumes (1883, 1884, 1887). Werenskiold kept closer to the look of peasant Norway, while Kittelsen loved exaggeration. In March 1887 he left for home, penniless, as the story goes: friends collected the money for the journey.

In Norway he settled with his sister and brother-in-law, the keeper of Skomvær Lighthouse in Lofoten. He lived there for almost two years and completed the books “From Life in Cramped Circumstances” (1889–1890), “From Lofoten” (1890–1891) and “Witchcraft” (1892); he wrote the texts to the drawings himself. The painting “Echo”, on which he worked in the north, was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, and he later called it his best work. In the same year, at Larvik, he met Inga Kristine Dahl, a skipper's daughter, and married her a few weeks later. They had nine children, and Inga handled the exhibitions and helped run the household. His first solo exhibition, of 231 works, opened in Christiania in October 1893 and was then shown in Bergen.

He worked on “The Black Death” in 1894–1895, but the book appeared only in 1900: forty-five drawings and fifteen poems about the plague. Many of the drawings are made from a child's height, as if a child were looking. The figure of Pesta herself, by report, was suggested by a woman he saw on Skåtøy.

In 1899 the family settled at Lauvlia, a house of their own building in Sigdal, with a view of the mountain Andersnatten. He considered these ten years his most productive: the series “Soria Moria Castle” and “Tirilil Tove” were made here, and the mountain was painted again and again. In the autumn of 1907 he visited the construction sites of the company Norsk Hydro at Notodden and Rjukan and painted five large watercolours commissioned by the company. In 1908 he received the Order of St. Olav. For editions of 1907–1910 he redrew many fairy-tale subjects, and he published the book “Soria Moria Castle” in 1911.

In 1910 the house in Sigdal had to be sold; the family moved to Huseby near Christiania, and from 1912 lived on the island of Jeløya near Moss. From 1911 he received a state artist's stipend. His last major work was the watercolour “Bog Cotton” (1913), for which his daughter Ingrid posed. Kittelsen died on Jeløya on 21 January 1914. Parliament granted his widow an annual allowance.