Portrait of Alexander L. Kielland

Eilif Peterssen's portrait of Alexander L. Kielland (1887) depicts one of the most important Norwegian literary figures of the 1880s — Kielland was a major novelist and playwright whose socially critical fiction engaged the same naturalist social observation that animated Ibsen's theater and Krohg's painting. Peterssen was a leading Norwegian painter who moved between Norway and Munich, and his portrait of Kielland connects the visual and literary wings of Norwegian cultural life. Kielland's work engaged issues of social class, bourgeois hypocrisy, and working conditions with the same directness that Krohg brought to his paintings.

Peterssen renders the novelist with the psychological directness appropriate to a subject who was himself committed to unvarnished social observation. His Munich-trained portrait technique provides the technical foundation for a portrait that seeks character over convention. The literary man's face — the quality of his intelligence and social engagement — is the portrait's center of gravity.