Harald Sohlberg ranks among Norway’s leading and most influential modernist landscape painters alongside his contemporary, compatriot, and friend Edvard Munch. His inimitable style, calmer and less psychologically charged than Munch’s, blending elements of Romanticism (borrowed from Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl) and of turn-of-the-century Symbolism, the real and the abstract, is underpinned by a rigorous graphic quality (learnt as an apprentice to a set painter and at Norway’s National College of Art and Design), and by the enamel-like application of vivid colour. Active at the height of the emergence of new artistic currents across Europe, his vision nevertheless defied categorization, and he rarely ventured beyond painting his native Norway.

The Old Captain’s House, Winter Afternoon exemplifies how in his art Sohlberg turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, transforming a seemingly mundane scene of the everyday into a haunting moodscape. Devoid of all narrative, the suggestion of human life, in this case a house and neighbouring cottage with a lone bare flagpole standing silent in the thawing snow, stand proxy for actual people. As in his views of the windswept streets of the mining town of Røros, views of the Fjord around Oslo, or the desolate mountains of Rondane, not the inhabitants but the claritys and sheer presence of objects – whether roads, houses, flagpoles or telegraph poles – invite the viewer’s mind to become immersed in the composition and to draw its own associations. Here, the juxtaposition of a domestic dwelling and the sprawling oak captures the contrast between the worldly and spiritual dimensions of life, resulting in what could be described as a landscape of the soul, with its echoes of the nocturnes of empty cities by the Symbolist painters William Degouve de Nuncques, Fernand Khnopff, and Vilhelm Hammershøi.

The subject of the painting, the Old Captain's house (much unchanged today) in the fishing village of Kjerringvik in Vestfold on the Oslo Fjord, is one which preoccupied Sohlberg for several years, from 1908 until 1914, and one to which he clearly attached considerable importance and meaning. Executed in 1909 as a prize for a public lottery to raise money for the proposed Kunsternes Hus in Oslo (an artists’ association run by and for the benefit of artists, still extant today), The Old Captain’s House, Winter Afternoon builds on (and is in a sense a daylight version of), his nocturne Moonlight Mood, of the same year, which also served as the prototype for Sohlberg’s lithograph of the composition he made in 1914. Compared to Moonlight Mood, and to a third rendition in oil, Midnight, of 1911, with their softer and more muted palettes, The Old Captain’s House, Winter Afternoon arrests the viewer with its striking colour contrasts and sharp, almost photographic, definition. In fact, all three oil versions were based on a photograph taken by Sohlberg – a keen photographer – himself.

The Old Captain’s House, Winter Afternoon was painted following the artist’s return to Norway after a peripatetic period of travel to Holland, Germany, and Italy. The trip and his still unreliable income as a painter had exhausted the Henrichsen Scholarship he had been awarded and left him and his young family in a financially precarious position, and so he spent from 1907–10 living in and around Kjerringvik on the west coast of the Oslo Fjord, hosted by various friends, and taking inspiration from the area for his paintings. The opportunity to paint a picture to raise money for the Kunsternes Hus was therefore not entirely without ulterior motives – he knew from experience ‘how many months of meat and bread and coffee and green soap it.mes ans!’.

Indeed, the painting could well be read as a reflection of the artist’s own state of mind in 1909, using some of the devices and leitmotifs found in his work of this t.mes . The skeletal tree, a reference to The Oak of the previous year and the spidery silhouettes in his ongoing exploration of his composition Winter Night in the Mountains, seems to overshadow, even envelop with its limbs, the house and its associations with security and family life, a reminder of the fragility of the human condition. While the dramatic yellow evening sky is both beautiful (with the thawing snow the harbings er of spring) and foreboding. In the event, The Old Captain’s House, Winter Afternoon probably helped boost the artist’s fortunes. With the help of his friend and fellow artist Christian Krohg it was toured around the Vestfold region, and the press it received helped put Sohlberg on a firm footing to pursue the next chapter of his artistic career.

Together with other Norwegian artists, Sohlberg went on to be represented at exhibitions in Denmark, Germany, Vienna and Venice. He also made a strong impression in the USA, not least through his participation in a major touring exhibition of Scandinavian art in 1912–13, including to the Albright Gallery in Buffalo where he came to the attention of, and inspired, Canada’s Group of Seven artists. Enjoying international recognition during his own lifet.mes , Sohlberg’s work has recently been re-appraised and brought back into the public eye following a major retrospective of his work in 2018–19 held at the Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the Museum Wiesbaden.