The story
Lars Hertervig spent most of his adult life poor and mentally ill around Stavanger, painting landscapes that few people outside the town saw, in his later years often on scraps of paper glued together. Today the city's art museum holds Norway's largest collection of his work, more than 70 oil paintings and watercolours. Old Pine Trees, from 1865, shows two ancient pines in a primeval forest early on a sunny morning, with blue-grey fog in the valleys and snow on the mountains beyond. It stayed in private hands until 1940, when it was left to the local art society.
That society, Stavanger Kunstforening, was founded in 1865, and its purchases became the core of the museum. Since 1992 the collection has lived in a building beside Mosvatnet lake, a short way from the city centre. Alongside Hertervig it collects the landscapes of Kitty Kielland, daughter of the society's founding chairman, and later Scandinavian art, including a 1924 Edvard Munch of figures working the soil beside a greenhouse.
