About this work
White birch trunks press close across the picture plane, their pale verticality dominating the composition — until a gap opens where a few trees have been felled, drawing the eye into the middle ground where two small girls are picking berries.
Positioned symmetrically, the figures anchor the scene with a stillness that, together with the rhythmic cadence of the trunks, gives the whole a quietly ceremonial calm.
Down the slope winds a stream of briskly running water, while in the foreground, verdant foxgloves tower amidst the birch trunks and moss-covered stones.
The birch leaves shimmer against a softly defocused background, and at the base of the trees the spindly stalks of foxgloves hang their flowers delicately, while small rocks encrusted with rich lichen complete the gently magical scene. Astrup's palette is saturated but never garish — the dense greens and pinks of high summer in western Norway, rendered with a graphic clarity that sits comfortably between painting and print.
The oil painting dates to 1909 and is held in the Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst, Arkitektur og Design in Oslo.
It preceded the carving of woodblocks — made between 1915 and 1920 — for a large-scale print of a slightly different composition, making *Foxgloves* a pivotal work in understanding the deep interplay between media that characterises Astrup's output.
Displayed alongside the original woodcut, the oil painting reveals his full creative process in miniature.
The motif stems from Astrup's native Jølster, and in this sense it is characteristic of his production — an artist who returned home from Paris and Berlin and spent the rest of his life making art from the valley outside his door. The foxgloves themselves grow in disturbed ground, and two tree stumps speak quietly to the presence of human hands, but the scene is a rich late-summer tangle of green.
*Foxgloves* earns its place on a wall that rewards sustained attention — a study, a reading room, a bedroom where daylight shifts through the hours. Its vertical format and cool woodland tonality suit calm, low-lit spaces, and it holds its own wherever natural materials — timber, stone, linen — set the register. Astrup's work has been described as being "so much brighter — not just in colour, but also in mood" than his great Norwegian contemporary Munch, and this painting exemplifies why: there is nothing ominous here, only a particular quality of northern attentiveness, a sense that the ordinary world — two children, some flowers, a stream — is worth looking at with complete seriousness. It speaks to those drawn to art
