Vecchi pini

Lars Hertervig trained at the Düsseldorf academy under the celebrated Norwegian landscapist Hans Gude, and for a while looked set for a real career. Then in the mid-1850s a breakdown sent him home, and he spent time in the Gaustad asylum near Oslo before returning, poor and largely forgotten, to the coast around Stavanger. He painted this in 1865, a forest that exists nowhere in particular, worked up from sketches and memory: two great pines rising from a valley filling with blue-grey fog, snow on the far peaks. He often painted alone on paper he had sized and prepared himself for want of canvas. The three old trees at the centre are, in his own conception, timber already dying, slowly rotting back down into the ground they grew from.