About this work
A mountain view opens across a meadow, peasants gathered and dancing beside a roaring bonfire — and from the first glance, the fire commands everything. The column of flames rises from a steep mountainside up toward the sky , the bonfire set back from the lake shore where the terrain is rocky and rises into the hills, clumps of flame appearing to break away from the main column as if they have a life of their own.
In the clear summer night, the mountains appear deep purple — a palette that sets the warm orange and gold of the fire in electric contrast against the Norwegian dark. A dark silhouette against the bright flames testifies to a lonely figure, while the other villagers have grouped together on the slope on the other side of the bonfire, talking and flirting with summer gaiety. As a sketch, the handling is frank and immediate: brushwork that reaches for sensation over finish, the scene caught in a moment of combustion and communal life.
Astrup was drawn to reusing images that fascinated him, often rendering the same subject multiple times as paintings and colour woodcuts — and the Midsummer Eve bonfire was among the motifs he returned to most obsessively. The reason runs deep. On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires blazed throughout the mountains and people swarmed up the hillsides, it was considered a sin for Christian folk to join in — so the young Astrup had to stand at a distance behind the fence and watch, with the envy that dug into his breast as the other children danced around the bonfire.
As an adult, Astrup celebrated such events in his paintings and prints , translating childhood longing into a lifelong visual obsession. The custom of lighting bonfires and gathering for games and dancing on Midsummer Night was a living tradition with symbolic connotations, and Astrup was personally interested in humanity's interdependence with nature — the Midsummer Night rituals alluding to the magic forces of the natural world. In this sketch, that obsession feels unguarded, closer to memory than monument.
This is a painting for rooms that can hold a little fire — a reading corner, a study, a living space where dark walls or natural timber will let the warmth of the canvas do its work. Astrup's exaggerated palette and the odd, flattening perspective he wielded with a folksy, almost naïve execution mean the work reads with equal power up close and from across the room. It speaks to the viewer who is drawn to art rooted in place and ritual — work that carries the weight of belonging and exclusion simultaneously. The mood it sets is intimate but not quiet: the fire is still burning.
