About this work
The largest of Astrup's midsummer pictures, *Midsummer Eve Bonfire* opens onto a summer night in which the mountains of western Norway appear deep purple — their hulking mass pressing down on a valley alive with fire and motion. It is the summer solstice, and the bonfires are lit. People from up the valley are piling tall cones of green branches; flames churn golden and flow downhill over a glacial outcrop.
A mountain view opens across the meadow, where peasants dance by the bonfire — figures small but vivid against the enormous, charged landscape around them. Astrup preferred to explore the tropes of modernism — the flattening, the odd perspectives and exaggerated palettes — which he wielded with a folksy, almost naïve execution, and every element of this canvas reflects that instinct: colour pushed past realism, forms simplified into pattern, the fire itself a sculptural presence at the heart of the scene.
Dated to before 1916 and held in the collection of the Savings Bank Foundation DNB at KODE Art Museums in Bergen, the painting belongs to the series of midsummer works that Astrup returned to across his entire career — in oils, on wood panels, and through his celebrated woodcuts. Astrup's father forbade his children from participating in midsummer festivities, with their drinking and dancing and roots in the pagan past, and that prohibition never lost its hold on his imagination. He was creating a visual language that peopled the land with spirits drawn from folktales, drawing on animistic beliefs centuries old — that a tree, a mountain, a river, or a fire can have a soul.
Norway had become fully independent only in 1905, and artists were engaged in helping to discover and build a national identity based on authentic local and regional characteristics — a project to which this painting, with its deep roots in seasonal ritual and rural life, contributes as powerfully as any work Astrup made.
Astrup's work is immediately recognisable for its bold use of colour, stylised forms, and emotional intensity, and *Midsummer Eve Bonfire* is the fullest expression of those qualities. It commands a wall — ideally a generous one, in a room where the light shifts through the day, coaxing the purples and golds into different conversations with each other. It speaks to viewers drawn to art that is both visually arresting and historically resonant: those who find in Nordic landscape painting something more than scenery, and who want a work charged with the specific feeling of a long, lit night in which ancient ritual and the natural world are briefly, exuberantly, one.
