Lars Hertervig

Some of the strangest, most luminous landscapes in Norwegian art were painted by a man who could not afford paint. Lars Hertervig was born in 1830 to a poor Quaker farming family on the island of Borgøy, north of Stavanger on the west coast of Norway. A patron spotted his talent and sent him to train at the Düsseldorf Academy under Hans Gude, a leading Norwegian landscape painter, and for a moment a real career seemed possible.

It broke apart quickly. Around 1854, after cruel treatment by fellow students, Hertervig suffered a mental collapse, went home, and in 1856 entered the Gaustad asylum. Declared legally incapable in 1858, he lost his funding and his place in the art world, and spent his last 30 years near destitution, ending up in a poorhouse.

He never stopped working. Unable to buy oils and canvas, he painted glowing skies and towering coastal pines in watercolour and gouache on whatever paper he could find, sometimes scraps glued together with paste he made from rye flour. His painting Old Pine Trees, its light banked over the Ryfylke coast, was ignored in his lifetime and now hangs in Norway's National Museum in Oslo.