About this work
The eye goes first to the figure — a woman stooping in a garden, gathering stalks of red rhubarb, her dark hair gathered at the nape of her neck, dressed in a blue and white patterned dress. This is Engel Astrup, the artist's wife, rendered with the tenderness of a man who once wrote that she had reignited his will to live. The scene is set in a spring garden high on a hill, and Engel's delicate white-and-blue dress fairly glows against the deep surrounding greens, while a mountain streaked with glacial ice across the lake creates a high horizon line that presses the scene toward the front plane. The rhubarb itself commands the composition with architectural force — plants that dwarf the family cultivating them — its crimson stalks and elephant-eared leaves flattened into near-decorative pattern, betraying Astrup's debt to Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking. As a study, the work has an unguarded directness: this is the artist thinking on canvas, working out the balance of figure, foliage, and sky before committing to the larger statement.
Astrup was a horticulturist as well as an artist, and he planted many varieties of rhubarb to harvest on his own farm at Sandalstrand, across the lake from his childhood home in Jølster. He painted the theme of a spring garden repeatedly throughout his life. The rhubarb paintings belong to his mature period, after his Berlin sojourn pushed his work away from naturalism toward multi-perspectival viewpoints, simplified forms, and an intense, heightened palette — a transformation he brought back to Jølster and the farm he built with Engel at Sandalstrand.
Rhubarb was a family specialty, with many varieties grown each year — it was simultaneously a crop, a wine ingredient, and an obsession. Astrup became well known in the area for cultivating over ten varieties of rhubarb. That the same plant could be kitchen garden staple and monumental painterly subject is entirely Astrupian: the domestic and the mythic collapsed into one another.
This print belongs in a room that isn't trying too hard — a white-walled kitchen, a reading room with wooden floors, a hallway where morning light enters at an angle and catches the greens. The mood is quiet, suffused with the thin light of a northern night, and though the painting exp
