Interpretive Resource

In the 1880s, Claude Monet undertook several painting campaigns, some of them to extremely rugged areas. Although he traveled less in the 1890s, Monet was still curious about sites beyond the realm of his house and garden at Giverny. An unusual opportunity presented itself in February 1895: his stepson Jacques Hoschedé, who was married to a Norwegian woman, had to go to Christiania (now Oslo) on business. Monet accompanied him, staying in Norway for two months.

Hoschedé took Monet to the fjordside village of Sandvika, about nine miles south of Christiania, where there was an artists’ colony. There, Monet executed views of the village and of Mount Kolsaas. Although he was somewhat perturbed by the interest taken in him by local painters, he probably added to his celebrity by stubbornly insisting on working outdoors in the poorest of conditions. He wrote to a friend in Paris: "You would have laughed if you could have seen me completely white, with icicles hanging from my beard like stalactites."

Monet knew that he approached the Scandinavian landscape as an outsider, with an interest more visual than cultural or historical. Perhaps this distance allowed him a freedom he would not have felt in front of a French motif. He compared Norwegian scenery to that seen in Japanese woodblock prints, likening Mount Kolsaas to Mount Fuji; the silhouette of the peak in the Art Institute’s painting, as well as the presence of a bridge in the foreground, are elements reminiscent of the Japanese prints Monet had been collecting for years. In Sandvika, Norway, Monet addressed the specific conditions of a northern winter, and also explored the universal appeal of landscape.