About this work
— Nikolai Astrup, before 1908. Oil on canvas, 68 × 73 cm. KODE Art Museums, Bergen.
A small funeral procession winds its way to the graveyard. The priest, recognisable by his white collar, leads from the front; behind him the mourners follow with the coffin.
Some of those in the procession carry hymnals, and their mouths are open in song.
The landscape is rendered in broad fields of caustic yellow-green set against colder greens and blue-violet tones, while a network of wooden hayracks and the rhythmic line of black-clad figures give the composition an unmistakably musical undertone.
An oppressive calm permeates the scene — as if all of nature holds its breath while the mourners slowly advance.
The layers of paint are thin and transparent, revealing that the procession once extended all the way to the painting's right edge; Astrup painted over eleven figures to centre the cortège and achieve a more balanced symmetry.
*Funeral Day in Jølster* is an oil on canvas completed before 1908, measuring 68 × 73 cm, and is held in the KODE Art Museums of Bergen.
The painting is a rare document of Astrup's attempt to translate music directly into colour. In his own notes on the work, Astrup described the sound of a country funeral in Jølster — the dissonances of antiquated psalms sung by old voices — and asked himself: "How can one reproduce something of this in colours?" The painting is his answer.
Astrup's own father, the local pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard — a rite that had taken place many times over the preceding centuries, and one that would eventually follow the artist's own early death in 1928.
Where contemporaries might have leaned on naturalistic tradition, Astrup preferred the flattening, exaggerated palettes and patterning of modernism — and the influence of Henri Rousseau is legible in this early work.
Astrup himself noted bitterly in 1927 that he had never earned a penny from it, having gifted it to Bergen Art Society in connection with his 1908 solo exhibition.
This is a painting that asks to be lived with slowly. Its dissonances can have a shrill effect on the eye, like the voices it encodes — yet the overall mood is one of muted grandeur, not distress. It suits spaces that reward sustained attention: a reading room, a study, a hallway with natural north light
