Skiers at the Top of a Snow-covered Hill

Skiers at the Top of a Snow-covered Hill, from 1894, is one of Thaulow's rare figure-dominated compositions, and its subject — skiing — marks it as distinctly Norwegian in cultural identity. Skiing as sport and leisure was intimately identified with Norwegian national culture in the late nineteenth century; Fridtjof Nansen's 1888 crossing of Greenland on skis, which became an international sensation, reinforced the association. For Thaulow, long resident in France, a painting of Norwegian skiers on a snow hilltop was an assertion of homeland identity through leisure culture. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston's acquisition reflects the broad international fascination with Norwegian subjects in this period. Technically, the work required Thaulow to integrate his landscape expertise in snow painting with figure painting at a larger scale than his usual tiny staffage.

The hilltop setting flattens the spatial recession available in valley-floor river compositions: the horizon is the sky itself, and spatial depth must be conveyed through the diminution of figures and surface texture. Snow texture on a hillside reads differently from flat-ground snow — wind effects, ski tracks, and compression under slope create directional patterns. The skiers' equipment and clothing are rendered with documentary attention.