Erik Werenskiøld

Born: Vinger, 1 February 1855

Died: Oslo, 23 November 1938

Nationality: Norwegian


Works by this Artist

Peasant Funeral
Erik Werenskiøld, 1883-85

Studies

with Julius Middelthun (1873-75, Christiania/Oslo); Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (1876-79); with Léon Bonnat (1881-83, Paris)

Career

1878 – meets editor and collector Peter Christien Asbjørnsen in Munich; contributes illustrations to Asbjørnsen’s collection of Norwegian fairy tales (1879)

1883 – returns to Norway; begins painting ethnographic themes

1890s – artistic editor/contributor to illustrated edition of Snorre Sturlasons’s sagas of the Norse kings (1896-99)

1917 – begins producing lithographs; publishes Art, Struggle, Culture [Kunst, kamp, kultur]

Travels

Munich (1876-81); Paris (1881-83, late 1880s; 1908); Berlin (1905)

Commissions from

explorer Fridtjof Nansen

Important Artworks

From Telemark, 1883 (The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo)

Landscape with Haymaker, 1893 (The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo)

Readings

Varnedoe, Kirk. Northern Light: Nordic Art at the Turn of the Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988

Werenskiøld, Merit. “Erik Werenskiøld in Munich 1875-1881,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, vol. 68, no. 2 (1999): 81-98

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