Frits Thaulow Prints

About Frits Thaulow

Johan Frederik Thaulow was born in Christiania, now Oslo, in October 1847, the son of a wealthy pharmacist. He studied at the Academy of Art in Copenhagen from 1870 to 1872 and with the landscape painter Hans Gude in Karlsruhe from 1873 to 1875. He then spent several years mostly in Paris, where the French Impressionists shaped his painting. He began as a marine painter, and in 1879 he sailed his own small boat to Skagen with Christian Krohg and painted the fishermen there. Back in Norway in 1880, he became a leader of the young naturalist painters with Krohg and Erik Werenskiold. In 1882 they helped found the Autumn Exhibition, Norway's first independent artists' show. In the early 1880s he ran an open-air painting school at Modum, and the young Edvard Munch was among the painters who worked there. Many of his best-known Norwegian scenes were painted at Åsgårdstrand. He moved to France in 1892 and painted in small towns such as Montreuil-sur-Mer, Dieppe and Quimperlé. He became well known abroad, and Claude Debussy and Andrew Carnegie owned his work. His winter pictures set snow-covered banks against dark, moving river water. He died in Volendam, in the Netherlands, in November 1906, while there to paint. The National Museum in Oslo holds 37 of his works.