About this work
What you see first is a procession — hulking, stooped forms lined across an open valley, their bundled bodies swaying as if mid-step. Grain poles were a common sight in Jølster during Astrup's lifetime: grain was cut and bound into sheaves, then stacked on tall poles to dry. But in Astrup's hands, the purely agricultural becomes animate and uncanny. The crops drying on their tall supports form a floppy regiment of figures with human faces — spirits of the valley.
In this version, the poles are made to resemble human beings via small, humoristic details: the grain pole at the right has been equipped with eyes, while another walks with a cane. The palette carries the saturated, high-contrast quality that defines Astrup's mature work — deep Norwegian greens giving way to mountain slopes under a sky of particular northern intensity, the bundled wheat forms rendered in warm amber and gold against the cool of the landscape behind them.
Dated to around 1920, *Grain Poles* belongs to a period in which Astrup was mining Norse folklore for the hidden life inside the landscape — the same year he painted a goblin formed by the silhouette of a pollarded tree in *A Morning in March*.
The childhood sense of the landscape as a magical place of potential transformation runs through many of Astrup's works; in *Grain Poles*, he evokes an army of trolls, making the likeness explicit with the suggestion of a face — a motif that also appears in *Spring Night and Willow* (1917).
Astrup's delight in landscape, mood, magic, and colour all converge in his paintings of grain poles — a motif he returned to across both painting and printmaking, and one that sits at the intersection of his documentary instinct and his folkloric imagination.
This is a painting for a room that earns its quiet — a study, a reading corner, a hallway where you pass slowly rather than rush. The north Norwegian light gives Astrup's paintings an eerie sense of dream; his richly coloured landscapes are full of high contrast, deep-shadowed trees blocked against blue and lilac skies, dark foregrounds in a myriad of greens, and distant mountain tops bleached in light. It rewards sustained looking: the longer you stay with it, the more the comic becomes strange, the agricultural becomes mythological, and the familiar — a field, a harvest, a row of drying sheaves — becomes populated with something older and less easily named. The viewer it speaks to most directly is one who finds folklore and landscape inseparable, and who values wit alongside gravity.
