Harald Sohlberg - Winter Night in Rondane, Neo-Romanticism and the painter of the Nordic night

Harald Sohlberg is the Norwegian artist who painted the Nordic winter night most beloved by the public. His Winter Night in Rondane - a snow-covered mountain massif in deep blue moonlight, a solitary star above Rondslottet, and sparse, twisted scrub in the foreground - was voted Norway's national painting by NRK viewers in 1995 and now hangs in the National Museum in Oslo. Few images capture the silence of the Nordic winter with equal precision, and few have found such a natural second life as posters and art prints in Scandinavian homes. Sohlberg's blue night is at once landscape, devotion, and abstraction.

But Sohlberg was more than a single painting. Over four decades, he built a small but concentrated body of work around a handful of motifs: the glow of sunset behind slender tree silhouettes, summer night over the Oslo Fjord, the mining town of Røros in snow, a flower meadow under a full moon, and fishermen's cottages along the Vestfold coast. He worked slowly, in thin layers of glaze, and could devote fifteen years to a single motif. This page follows his life from the fur trader's home in Kristiania to the mountains, examines his major works, explains the technique behind the luminous blue, covers the record prices at Sotheby's, the major exhibitions in 2019 and 2025, the works in Swedish collections, and how his images work in a contemporary home.

Contents
↓ Who was Harald Sohlberg?
↓ From Kristiania to Røros - life and background
↓ Major works - Winter Night in Rondane and the other nights
↓ Technique and style - glazing, symmetry, and cosmic space
↓ Neo-Romanticism, Munch, and the legacy
↓ Where can Sohlberg be found today? Museums, Sweden, and auctions
↓ Sohlberg at home - how the blue winter night works
↓ Timeline
↓ Related artists and movements
↓ Frequently asked questions about Harald Sohlberg

Who was Harald Sohlberg?

Harald Oskar Sohlberg (1869–1935) was a Norwegian painter, draughtsman, and graphic artist, born and died in Oslo, and perhaps the most important representative of Neo-Romanticism in Norwegian art. He belonged to the generation after Erik Werenskiold, Christian Krohg, and Frits Thaulow - the naturalists who had brought plein-air painting to Norway in the 1880s - but turned away from their interest in weather, light and atmosphere, and everyday realism. Instead, Sohlberg wanted to paint the experience of nature: the silence, the dizzying expanse, the feeling of standing on a heavy planet and looking out into an infinite universe, as he himself put it.

His output was limited. He worked so slowly and meticulously that the number of completed oil paintings is counted in tens rather than hundreds, alongside around ten etchings made between 1912 and 1931 and a large color lithograph after Winter Night in Rondane that took three years to complete. This very limited quantity gives each work considerable weight - and on the rare occasions when a major work appears at auction, it becomes international news.

Quick facts: Born 29 November 1869 in Kristiania (Oslo), died 19 June 1935 in Oslo, aged 65. Son of fur trader Johan W. Sohlberg (1831–1909) and Johanne Viker (1837–1902). Student at Den kongelige Tegneskole 1885–1890, with Kristian Zahrtmann in Copenhagen in the winter of 1891–92, and at the art academy in Weimar in 1896–97. Debuted at the Høstutstillingen in 1894 with Natteglød (1893), which was acquired by the National Gallery. Married Lilli Hennum (1878–1967) on 16 October 1901. Lived in Røros from 1902 to 1905. Vinternatt i Rondane (1914, oil on canvas, 160.4 × 180 cm, inventory number NG.M.01185) was begun after a skiing trip during Easter 1899, completed in the spring of 1914, and donated to the National Gallery by Jørgen Brede Stang in 1918. Gold medal at the 1915 World's Fair in San Francisco. Auction record: £2,677,000 for The Old Captain's House, Winter Afternoon (1909) at Sotheby's in London on 8 December 2021. Retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London from 13 February to 2 June 2019. Represented in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and the Gothenburg Museum of Art.

From Kristiania to Røros - life and background

The fur trader's son who was supposed to learn a trade

Sohlberg grew up in a prosperous bourgeois home in Kristiania, where his father ran a fur business. The boy drew constantly, and artists among the family's acquaintances recognized his talent early on. His father was nevertheless skeptical of an artistic career and wanted his son to learn a proper trade. The compromise was Den kongelige Tegneskole, where Harald attended decorative painter Wilhelm Krogh's class from 1885 until the autumn of 1890. His training as a decorative painter - with its demands for precise drawing, clean surfaces, and the planning of large areas - left its mark on everything he did later. The austere, almost decorative stylization of his mature landscapes originated here.

In the summer of 1889, he painted independently for the first time, during a stay in Nordtorp in Valdres. The study Sommeraften from that year, rendered in soft violet tones, already reveals his interest in the mood of nature that would become his life's work. The following year, Erik Werenskiold secured him a place with Sven Jørgensen in Slagen near Åsgårdstrand - a teacher with whom Sohlberg soon came into conflict, but whose figure drawing nevertheless influenced him. In the autumn of 1891, he received guidance from Werenskiold and Eilif Peterssen, and that same winter spent three months with Kristian Zahrtmann in Copenhagen, the Danish painter who trained an entire generation of Nordic colourists.

The breakthrough in 1894 and the years abroad

In the autumn of 1894, Sohlberg made his debut at the State Art Exhibition – the Autumn Exhibition – with Night Glow, painted the previous year. The painting shows thin, dark silhouettes of trees against a blazing yellow-red evening sky that also colors the reflection in the water beneath them. Every leaf in the foreground is rendered sharply, while the background is stylized and diffuse – the contrast technique that would become his signature. That same year, Halfdan Egedius made his debut with Saturday Evening, and the two paintings are generally regarded as marking the breakthrough of Neoromanticism in Norwegian art. Night Glow was acquired by the National Gallery, an unusual honor for a 24-year-old debutant. Sohlberg later wrote that the motif, with its dark details against the burning sunset, had impressed itself so strongly on his mind that he could not rest until he had painted it – and that this was the beginning of his "later line."

With support from the Houen Grant in 1895 and 1896, he traveled to Paris, where he completed, among other works, Ripe Fields, and then went on to Germany. During the 1896–97 academic year, he studied at the art academy in Weimar under Frithjof Smith. It is worth noting how little of the French avant-garde left an impression: Sohlberg was uninterested in Impressionism's "half-hour devotion," as he called it, and instead sought something enduring, almost timeless. When he returned home in 1899, he painted Summer Night, a view from a villa in Nordstrand across the Oslo Fjord toward the Bærum Hills, where a set table on the veranda stands out sharply against an infinitely deep, blue-green fjord and sky. The painting is his first fully mature work.

Rondane, marriage, and the mining town of Røros

At Easter 1899, Sohlberg went on a ski tour north from Kristiania toward Rondane, the mountain massif between Gudbrandsdalen and Østerdalen. There he experienced the mountains in moonlight, an experience he described as "strange, new, and immense as a revelation." According to the National Museum, he made his first sketch for Winter Night in Rondane on the train home. During the winters of 1900–1902, he returned several times, stayed in mountain cabins, took photographs, and produced around ten studies in oil, watercolor, charcoal, and crayon – one of these eventually ended up in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

On October 16, 1901, he married Lilli Rachel Hennum, daughter of the kapellmeister Johan Hennum of the Christiania Theatre. The following year, the couple moved to Røros, the old copper-mining town on the mountain plateau toward the Swedish border, where they remained until 1905. Finances were poor and his health fragile, but the years in Røros became his richest as an artist. From 1911, the family lived permanently in Kristiania, and Sohlberg increasingly painted motifs from the city and its surroundings: Akershus Fortress, Vestre Aker Church, the working-class neighborhoods along the Akerselva. He died on June 19, 1935, at the age of 65.

The major works – Winter Night in Rondane and the other nights

Winter Night in Rondane (1914) – fifteen years of work on a single motif

The final version of Winter Night in Rondane measures 160.4 × 180 cm and is painted in oil on canvas. The composition is strictly symmetrical: Rondslottet and Høgronden rise like a snow-covered palace in the center of the image, a shining star stands on the central axis, and in the foreground twisted dwarf birches and juniper bushes form a dark portal, "almost like a stage curtain", opening onto the blue landscape. No person, no cabin, no tracks in the snow. On Høgronden's slope, Sohlberg painted a cross, a sign of the religious feeling he himself described in a letter to his mother in December 1901: the mountain in winter makes one silent and deeply moved; one feels something of what one feels beneath a vast church vault, "only a thousand times stronger".

The road there was long. Sohlberg wanted the painting ready for the 1900 Autumn Exhibition but did not succeed. In 1901 he set the large canvas aside and did not touch it again until 1911. In the spring of 1914 it was finally completed, just in time for the Jubilee Exhibition at Frogner that same year, which commemorated the centenary of Norway's constitution. The painting attracted great attention, was purchased in 1915 by shipowner Jørgen Brede Stang, and donated by him to the National Gallery in 1918. Today it hangs in Room 061 in the National Museum's new building by Oslo's harbor, in the "Moods and feelings" section. In 1995 it was named Norway's national painting in a vote organized by NRK, and in 2005 the Sohlbergplassen viewpoint at Lake Atnsjøen, designed by architect Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk, was inaugurated as a stop along the Rondane National Tourist Route. From there, visitors can see exactly the motif Sohlberg saw.

Night Glow, Summer Night and the early nights

Night Glow (1893) and Summer Night (1899), both in the National Museum, are the two works that established Sohlberg's pictorial world. The first is a sunset seen through a curtain of slender trees; the second is a summer night at Nordstrand, where the still life in the foreground - a table with glasses, bottles and fruit on a veranda, just vacated by those who had been sitting there - stands in sharp contrast to the cosmic expanse beyond. Sohlberg wrote that he wanted the ridgeline in the background to be "as if infinite and whole and alive, immense and melodious". The emptiness left by the people is a recurring underlying note in his art; the art historian Øivind Storm Bjerke gave his 1991 monograph the title Harald Sohlberg: The Painter of Loneliness, the painter of loneliness.

The Røros paintings: Night, the streets, and the flower meadow

Some of Sohlberg's most powerful works date from his years in Røros, 1902-1905. The two street scenes with the church tower in the background, Gate i Røros (1902 and 1903, both in the National Museum), show the low timber houses in snow, anchored by the imposing Baroque tower from 1784. The major work from the period is Natt (1904, Trondheim Kunstmuseum), a rigorously symmetrical view of Røros Church seen across the cemetery with its leaning crosses. Sohlberg painted it on site in the evenings, but removed the sacristy to give the image greater calm and monumentality - a typical example of how he edited reality to achieve the mood. En blomstereng nordpå (1905, National Museum), with a subject from Gullikstad outside Røros, is a bright, cool summer-night scene: a rectangular meadow of oxeye daisies beneath a pale full moon, positioned exactly on the central axis of the image. The painting was exhibited at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 2006 and has become one of his most widely reproduced motifs as an art print.

The fishermen's cottages on the coast and the late cityscapes

After Røros, Sohlberg turned to the small fishing villages and pilot harbors on the western side of the Oslo Fjord: Slagen, Kjerringvik, Nevlunghavn, Helgeroa. Here he painted Fiskerens hus (1906) and Et hus ved kysten (1907), the latter exhibited at the 1907 Venice Biennale. The motif - a small cottage behind a wide-branched tree, with the sea and a bright horizon behind it - reappeared in From Værvågen, The Fisherman's Cottage (1921, 94 × 121 cm), which sold at Sotheby's in London in December 2016 for £1,208,750, double the estimate and a record at the time. Among the late cityscapes, Rønner og fabrikker (1912, Gothenburg Museum of Art) stands out, a stark depiction of the workers' cottages along the Akerselva, as does Våraften, Akershus (1913, Oslo City Hall), in which a huge ash tree silhouettes itself against a golden-yellow evening sky.

"I have a distinct feeling that I am standing on a heavy, solid sphere and that from it I can look out into an infinite universe." - Harald Sohlberg, quoted in Norsk kunstnerleksikon

Technique and style - glazing, symmetry, and cosmic space

The glazing technique: thin layers that make the colors glow

What makes Sohlberg's blues glow from within is the glazing technique. Instead of applying paint thickly and opaquely, as the Impressionists did, he built up the surface in many thin, semitransparent layers of oil paint, one over another, allowing light to penetrate the paint and reflect from the light-colored ground. The result is described in Store norske leksikon as "enamel-like luminosity". The technique is slow – each layer must dry before the next is applied – and partly explains why Winter Night in Rondane took so many years. In the Røros paintings, especially Night, fine reddish and violet tones break through the blue in a way that is impossible to achieve with opaque paint. The same method gives the late coastal paintings their bright, almost porcelain-like horizons.

Sharp foreground, diffuse background

Sohlberg's compositional principle is almost always the same: a foreground studied down to the smallest detail – every leaf, every twig, every glass on the table – set against a background simplified into large, still fields of color. The contrast creates depth without traditional aerial perspective and gives the images their dreamlike, visionary quality. At the same time, he was careful about balance. He wrote of Winter Night in Rondane that the foreground must not become too dense and overfilled: it must not create a desolate and wild impression, "because this is where the picture's night and anguish are to dwell". The decorative painter's training can be seen in the way the surfaces are planned and in the austere, often mirror-symmetrical structure, with the motif centered on a central axis – the star, the full moon, the church tower, the window cross.

Drawing, photography and printmaking

Sohlberg was a skilled and expressive draughtsman, and drawing underpins all his painting. For the Rondane motif, he also used his own photographs as study material, something unusually openly acknowledged at the time. He started working as a printmaker late: he took etching lessons at Tegneskolen in the autumn of 1906 and from 1911 to 1917, and produced a total of ten prints between 1912 and 1931, including The Fisherman's House (1913) and The Stillness. The large color lithograph after Winter Night in Rondane, completed in 1917 after three years of work, is one of the earliest examples of a Norwegian work of art being deliberately reproduced for homes – a direct precursor to today's art prints and posters.

Neo-Romanticism, Munch and the legacy

Sohlberg belongs to Nordic Neo-Romanticism, the art of mood that around 1890 replaced plein-air Naturalism throughout Scandinavia. In Norway it was he and Halfdan Egedius; in Sweden, Prince Eugen, Karl Nordström and Richard Bergh; in Finland, Akseli Gallen-Kallela; and in Denmark, Vilhelm Hammershøi. What they shared was a desire to depict the inner world – longing, solitude, devotion – through the outer landscape, along with an attraction to symmetry, stylization and muted color. The connection to European Symbolism is clear; Nasjonalmuseet calls Winter Night in Rondane "perhaps the pinnacle of Symbolist landscape painting in Norway", even though it was completed late relative to the golden age of Symbolism.

Comparison with Edvard Munch, six years older, has been unavoidable, and Sohlberg consistently rejected it throughout his career. The difference is real: Munch’s landscapes are psychological projections, while Sohlberg’s are still, almost religious observations. Yet there are points of contact – the winding branches in The Fisherman’s House have been compared with the ash tree in Munch’s university painting History – and in 1995 the National Academy of Design in New York devoted an entire exhibition to the relationship, Munch/Sohlberg: Landscapes of the Mind. Gustav Vigeland, who was Sohlberg’s friend in his youth, made a bust of him in 1892, now at the Vigeland Museum; in 1981, a granite bust by Hans Holmen was erected in Røros. Sohlberg was awarded a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 and an honorable mention in Barcelona in 1929, and in 1922–24 he served as an alternate member of the National Gallery’s acquisitions committee.

In the 21st century, international interest has grown. The National Museum in Oslo presented the retrospective Harald Sohlberg. Infinite Landscapes in 2018–19, with a catalogue by Marianne Yvenes, after which the exhibition travelled on to Dulwich Picture Gallery in London – Sohlberg’s first major retrospective in the United Kingdom, 13 February–2 June 2019, timed to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth – and to Museum Wiesbaden, which gave him the first retrospective on the European continent. In 2025, he was included in Northern Lights at Fondation Beyeler in Basel (26 January–25 May 2025), an exhibition of 62 Nordic and Canadian landscapes from 1880–1930, which was subsequently shown at Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York until 12 January 2026. There, he was displayed alongside Munch, Hilma af Klint, Prince Eugen, and Gustaf Fjæstad.

Where is Sohlberg today? Museums, Sweden, and auctions

Norwegian Collections

The National Museum in Oslo holds the central collection: Nattglow, Summer Night, the two Røros streets, A Flower Meadow in the North, Afternoon Sun, the portrait Eugenie (1891), and naturally Winter Night in Rondane, as well as a larger number of Rondane studies from 1901–02 that the museum acquired in 2020. Trondheim Kunstmuseum owns Night, the Rasmus Meyer Collections in Bergen From Sagene (1911), Drammen Museum Andante (1908) and The Oak (1908), and Oslo City Hall Spring Evening, Akershus. The Hilmar Reksten Collection in Bergen has an early version of Winter Night in the Mountains (1901).

Sohlberg in Sweden

Two Swedish museums own works by Sohlberg. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm has one of the studies for Winter Night in Rondane from the winters of 1900-02, and the Gothenburg Museum of Art owns Rønner og fabrikker (1912), the dark depiction of the factory districts along the Akerselva, which he himself repeated in a milder version in 1933. At the Nationalmuseum, En blomstereng nordpå was displayed in 2006 as one of the Norwegian contributions to the museum's major survey of Nordic landscape painting. For Swedish viewers, the connection to Prince Eugen and Waldemarsudde is particularly clear: both painted the Nordic twilight in quiet, simplified fields, and Fjæstad's snowy landscapes from Värmland are the closest Swedish equivalent to the Rondane painting.

The auction market: from £535,000 to £2.7 million

Since Sohlberg painted so little and most of his work is in museums, the auction market is very thin. In 1999, the record was set at £535,000 at Sotheby's. On December 14, 2016, From Værvågen, The Fisherman's Cottage (1921) was sold at Sotheby's in London for £1,208,750, equivalent to 12.9 million Norwegian kroner, after remaining in the same family since the fur trader's friend, wine merchant Alfred Larsen, bought it directly from the artist. Five years later, on December 8, 2021, The Old Captain's House, Winter Afternoon (1909, oil on canvas, 70.5 × 82.5 cm) was hammered down for £2,677,000 at Sotheby's Old Masters Evening Sale, against an estimate of £1-1.5 million. In Norway, Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner recorded 3 million Norwegian kroner for Uværsstemning (1904) that same year.

Sohlberg at home - how the blue winter night works

Winter Night in Rondane is one of the most sought-after Nordic motifs as a poster, and there are good reasons for that. The deep blue palette is calm without being cold, the composition is symmetrical and therefore easy to place, and the motif is completely free of time markers - no people, no buildings, no clothing that dates the image. It works just as well in a white, minimalist room as against a dark blue or gray-green feature wall, where the blue tone in the image makes the wall seem deeper. Since the original is almost square (160 × 180 cm), the motif is best suited to a larger format, preferably 50 × 70 cm or 70 × 100 cm, hung alone above a sofa or bed with space around it. Browse blue posters for similar tones, or nature and landscapes for mountain and forest motifs in the same spirit.

The lighter Sohlberg motifs – En blomstereng nordpå, Sommernatt, Fiskerens hus – have a different character. The oxeye daisy meadow under the full moon in pale green and cream white suits bedrooms and rooms with light wood, and it can be advantageously combined with minimalist posters in a gallery wall where Sohlberg’s image is the only figurative element. The summer night with its set table is a natural choice for the dining area. The coastal motifs work well in a hallway or mountain cabin, where a dark-stained oak frame enhances the feel of the early 20th century. Our guide to posters for the mountain cabin and the guide to posters for dark walls explain how the colors of the Nordic night meet different wall colors.

Tip: Sohlberg’s night and twilight paintings are painted in thin layers of glaze and lose their inner light if exposed to too much direct sunlight in the room. Hang The Winter Night on a wall that receives indirect light, preferably with a small spotlight or floor lamp with warm light (2 700 K) angled toward the image in the evening - then the violet and reddish tones emerge from the blue in the same way as in the original. Choose a narrow black or dark brown wooden frame without a mat for the large Rondane motif, and a light oak frame with a wide mat for the flower meadow. More about frame selection can be found in our guide to gallery walls.

If you want to build an entire wall around Nordic turn-of-the-century art, Sohlberg is an excellent starting point. Combine the winter night with a twilight scene by Prins Eugen, a Skagen beach by Krøyer, and a grey-toned interior by Hammershøi, and you will have a cohesive Nordic palette ranging from blue through grey to golden. More ideas about how Nordic motifs interact can be found in the article Nordic art in the home, and you can find our full selection of classic masters in the famous artists collection.

Timeline

1869 – Harald Oskar Sohlberg was born on November 29 in Kristiania, the son of furrier Johan W. Sohlberg.

1885–1890 – Student in decorative painter Wilhelm Krogh’s class at the Royal School of Drawing.

1889 – Painted independently for the first time in Nordtorp in Valdres; the study Sommeraften.

1891–1892 – Corrected by Werenskiold and Peterssen; three months with Kristian Zahrtmann in Copenhagen. Vigeland made a bust of him in 1892.

1894 – Debut at the Høst Exhibition with Natteglød, which was acquired by the National Gallery. The breakthrough of Neo-Romanticism in Norway.

1895–1897 – Houen’s grant; stays in Paris, Hamburg, and Berlin, and studies at the academy in Weimar.

1899 – Summer Night is painted at Nordstrand. Ski trip to Rondane at Easter; the first sketch for the winter night is made on the train home.

1900–1902 – About ten studies of Rondane, one of which later ends up in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. The large canvas is set aside in 1901.

1901 – Marries Lilli Hennum on October 16.

1902–1905 – Lives in Røros: Street in Røros, Night, A Flower Meadow in the North, The Country Road.

1906–1910 – Coastal motifs from Slagen and Kjerringvik; A House by the Coast is shown at the Venice Biennale in 1907.

1911–1914 – Resumes and completes Winter Night in Rondane; shown at the Jubilee Exhibition at Frogner in 1914.

1915 – Gold medal at the World's Fair in San Francisco. J.B. Stang buys the Rondane painting.

1917–1918 – The color lithograph after the winter night is completed after three years of work; the painting is donated to the National Gallery.

1935 – Sohlberg dies in Oslo on June 19.

1995 – Winter Night in Rondane is named Norway's national painting in an NRK poll; exhibition on Munch and Sohlberg in New York.

2005 – Sohlbergplassen at Atnsjøen is inaugurated as part of the Rondane National Tourist Route.

2019 – Retrospectives in Oslo, London (Dulwich Picture Gallery), and Wiesbaden for the 150th anniversary.

2021 – Auction record: £2,677,000 at Sotheby's in London on December 8.

2025–2026 – Included in Northern Lights at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

Related artists and movements

Sohlberg is the foremost landscape painter of Neo-Romanticism and Nordic Symbolism in Norway, and he is best viewed alongside his neighbors. The obvious comparison is Edvard Munch, whose psychological landscapes he both resembled and distanced himself from. In Sweden, Prince Eugen is his closest relative, with his twilights over tranquil fields, while Eugène Jansson gave Stockholm the same blue night that Sohlberg gave the mountains. The Danish silence of Vilhelm Hammershøi and the blue hour of the Skagen painters belong to the same Nordic world of mood. Further back, Sohlberg's lonely mountains and star point toward Caspar David Friedrich and the sublime landscapes of Romanticism.

In terms of movement, he belongs to Symbolism and Nordic National Romanticism, and his work is a central chapter in the history of the movement on our page about landscape painting. A broader overview can be found in the guide to Nordic art and in the guide to art history. All our fact pages about artists and art movements are collected in the Knowledge Bank.

Frequently asked questions about Harald Sohlberg

The Nordic night is one of the most beautiful subjects to hang on the wall - still, timeless, and full of light despite the darkness. Discover posters and art prints in the same spirit in our nature and landscapes collection, or browse blue posters to find your own winter night. Read more about Sohlberg at the National Museum in Oslo, in the Store norske leksikon and on Swedish Wikipedia.