Båten (Viksfjord)

Though most associated with the city of Røros and the Rondane Mountains further north, from 1911 Sohlberg lived full-time in Oslo, and views in and around the city and of the harbors on the western side of the fjord leading to the capital, including Slagen, Kjerringvik, Nevlunghavn, Helgeroa and Viksfjord, where the present work was painted, came to dominate his artistic output. Sohlberg was committed to the Romantic idea of the artist as solitary genius and tended to isolate himself for large periods of time, devoting himself entirely to his paintings. It is perhaps no surprise then that his best and most iconic landscapes are entirely free of figures, capturing the unmediated feeling of awe and insignificance before the power of nature that the artist himself had experienced so many times in his homeland.

Much like his fellow Norwegian, Edvard Munch, Sohlberg rejected the influence of other contemporary artists on his own style and attempts to place his paintings in the broader context of art history. Sohlberg was dismissive of attempts to associate him with Impressionism in particular, saying his works were not interested in capturing ‘a half-hour of devotion’ to atmosphere, but rather the vastness and physical presence of the landscape. ‘I have a distinct feeling’, he said, ‘that I am standing on a heavy, solid globe and that from it I look out into an infinite space.’ The present work reflects this preoccupation, with the great blue sweep of the sky, drifting clouds, and distant hills becoming one with the calm, receding water of the harbor and defining the 'dominant' color of the composition, which Sohlberg insisted each painting should have. The color harmonies of the background give way to the vibrant green shoreline at lower left, but the composition’s 'dominant color' reasserts itself in the boat and shadows of the foreground, capturing both the mood and intensity of light of a peaceful summer’s day on the Norwegian coast.