About this work
White birch trunks crowd the picture plane, their pale verticals pressing close together before opening, where a few trees have been felled, onto a middle ground where two small girls are quietly picking berries.
The girls are placed with a gentle symmetry that, together with the rhythm of the trunks, settles the whole scene into stillness — and then, winding down the slope, a small stream cuts through the composition, while in the foreground verdant foxgloves rise tall among moss-covered stones.
Their flowers hang delicately from spindly stalks, and the rocks around them are encrusted with rich lichen growth, completing a scene that feels quietly magical. The palette is the deep, saturated green of a Norwegian midsummer forest, punctuated by the pale columns of birch and the soft pink blush of the foxglove bells — a composition that feels at once monumental and intimate.
The *Foxgloves* motif originated as an oil painting in 1909, and Astrup later returned to it obsessively, carving woodblocks between 1915 and 1920 for a large-scale print of a slightly different composition.
He began inking the woodblocks in 1918, experimenting with ways to achieve a successful colour woodcut, and often embellished individual impressions with painted details by hand, making each one unique.
The motif stems from Astrup's native village of Jølster, and in this sense is entirely characteristic of his life's work. That he returned to this same clearing, this same cluster of wildflowers, across nearly two decades and two media speaks to the depth of his attachment — not nostalgia, but a sustained, almost devotional looking. Among those who know Astrup's output well, *Foxgloves* is singled out as one of his most essential paintings.
This is a work for spaces that can hold quiet authority — a study, a reading room, a bedroom with northern light. The foxgloves stand front and centre, tall stalks and hanging bells of flowers, growing in disturbed ground where two tree stumps mark the disturbance of men, but the scene is a rich late-summer tangle of green. It will resonate with anyone drawn to the borderland between the wild and the inhabited — viewers who find beauty not in drama but in the persistence of small, specific things: the moss on a stone, a child bending to pick fruit, a flower that grows exactly where it chooses.
