A Norwegian River in Winter

A gifted artist who left home at the age of fifteen to pursue training in Christiana (now Oslo) and Düsseldorf, Ludvig Skramstad had his first exhibition of landscape paintings in 1875. By 1880, he had developed a reputation as a painter of motifs from the landscapes of eastern Norway: spruce forests, pine bogs, fjords, waterfalls, and winter scenes. He was commissioned to paint several large murals, giving him the opportunity to further refine his talent for painting at scale. The blurred strokes and thinly painted surfaces of this wintery scene epitomize Skramstad’s style and reflect his attention to advances in photography in the 1880s.