About this work
The eye enters *Foxgloves* through a screen of white birch trunks — white birch trunks closely distributed across the pictorial surface — before settling into the quiet drama beyond. A few trees are cut down, creating an opening into the middle ground where two little girls are picking berries, positioned symmetrically, their presence contributing to the composition's serene atmosphere.
Winding its way down the slope is a little stream with briskly running water, while in the foreground verdant foxgloves tower amidst the birch trunks and moss-covered stones. The palette moves between the cool silver-white of birch bark, the deep green of summer undergrowth, and the soft pink of the foxglove bells. Twin birch trees stand out unnaturally in the light at the edge of a dark wood, their leaves shimmering against a defocused background, with the spindly stalks of foxgloves hanging their flowers delicately, and small rocks encrusted with rich growths of lichen completing the gently magical scene.
*Foxgloves* is an oil on canvas measuring 87 × 115 cm, painted in 1909 and now held in the Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst, Arkitektur og Design in Oslo.
A number of works titled *Foxgloves* demonstrate the interplay between media that characterizes Astrup's production: the oil painting from 1909 preceded the carving of woodblocks, made between 1915 and 1920, for a large-scale print of a slightly different composition. The motif is entirely rooted in Astrup's home terrain — it stems from his native village of Jølster, and in this sense is characteristic of his production. By 1909, Astrup had exhibited in Kristiania and Bergen to real acclaim, yet had chosen to stay in western Norway rather than pursue a cosmopolitan career. If one were to remember only one of Astrup's paintings, many critics have argued it should be *Foxgloves* — a work that concentrates his entire sensibility: the close observation of a specific, beloved place, and the way that place feels half-inhabited by something older than the people who live there.
This is a painting that rewards a wall with breathing room. Its vertical birch trunks give it an almost architectural presence, making it well suited to a hallway, a stairwell landing, or a reading room with natural light that shifts through the day. The mood is contemplative without being melancholy — there is life in the scene, human figures among the trees, water moving through it — but the overall effect is stilled, as if the viewer has come upon something private and unhurried. It will speak most strongly to those drawn to the natural world not as spectacle but as intimate company.
