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The almost 300 paintings and 100 drawings contained in Amaldus
Nielsen’s Painting Collection span his entire career
from 1856 to 1932, the year of his death. The Collection was
donated to the City of Oslo by Nielsen’s family in 1933.
Amaldus Clarin Nielsen was born in 1838 and grew up in Mandal,
a small town on Norway’s southernmost tip. He was already
painting studies of the coastline near his home as a 20-year-old.
He attended classes at the Academy of Art in Copenhagen from
1854 to 1856 and studied twice under Hans Gude, once at the Academy
of Art in Düsseldorf 1857–58 and ten years later in
Karlsruhe.
Nielsen made numerous study trips, one of which took him to
Spain. His studies from the area are characterised by a light,
free brush stroke and vivid colours. Amaldus Nielsen has been
called ‘Painter of the South’, meaning in this case
southern Norway, but his paintings from Hardanger, Sogn and Hvaler,
among other places, testify to an equal fascination with the
western and eastern parts of the country. His works do contain
some urban motifs, from the Majorstua district of Christiania
(now Oslo) where he lived, but they derive from a later period
in his life. The painting Morning in Ny Hellesund (National Gallery)
from 1885 and its different versions represent the high water
mark in the painter’s career. The Stenersen Museum’s
collection contains many works with motifs from that part of
the country.
According to Nielsen himself, nature was his greatest source
of inspiration and teacher. He strived to represent nature as
precisely, objectively and straightforwardly as possible. The
Academy of Art in Düsseldorf was a leading institution in
the German Romantic movement in the 1800s. Sublime landscapes
were emphasised, with diminutive human beings set beside cascading
waterfalls and gliding cloud formations. Nielsen was no typical
Düsseldorf painter, he stood by his naturalistic preferences,
which brought him into trouble with many of his contemporaries.
Later, younger colleagues like Erik Werenskiold and the 1880s
generation of young, naturalistic painters claimed Nielsen as
the first real naturalistic outdoor painter in Norway. His objective
realism, they said, created a bulwark against the artifice of
the Düsseldorf painters.
Nielsen was adamant when it came to making studies in the open
air, a practice he started as early as the 1860s. The study of
nature was in itself a complete, independent artwork. The whole
point was to depict the motif as one saw it, and he studied light
and atmospheric painting techniques very closely. His landscapes
are scrupulously done, with telling details from the coastal
habitat he knew so well. Nielsen moved in 1869 to Majorstuveien
8 in Christiania, where he lived to the end of his days. He continued
to travel, however, and in the latter half of the 1870s he found
most of his motifs in the Mandal area, fjord country in Western
Norway and the coastline around Hvaler, in the Southeast of the
country. The weather in these pictures is generally fine, in
opposition to the storms and harsh climate of the coast. His
talent for observation is to the fore in these renderings of
sunlight, waves and play of light on the surface of the water.
In 1886 Nielsen’s wife and three of his 11 children succumbed
in a diphtheria epidemic, after which his capacity to work started
to wane. He remarried two years later, but age made travelling
arduous, and the motifs from the south of the country we see
in the works he completed in the 1920s were done either from
memory or on the basis of earlier works.
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