Farm, Vik at Stange

This 1884 canvas depicts a farm at Vik near Stange in Hedmark county, the broad agricultural region of eastern Norway that was a productive subject for landscape and rural genre painters during the naturalist period. Hedmark's open farmland, large working farms, and low wooded hills presented a different visual character than the dramatic fjord and mountain scenery of western Norway — here the land was more horizontal, more open, more akin to the agricultural landscapes of Denmark and northern Germany. Munthe was among several Norwegian painters who found subject matter in this quieter, more domestic landscape that required a different aesthetic approach than the sublimity of the western mountains. The farm at Vik, with its agricultural buildings and surrounding fields, belongs to the rural documentation that was central to national romantic painting — an inventory of the authentic Norwegian countryside as a repository of national identity and traditional life.

A farm in the Hedmark landscape requires careful spatial organisation of the horizontal plains characteristic of eastern Norwegian terrain. The farm buildings provide vertical and architectural structure in a predominantly horizontal composition. Light conditions vary by season — summer's long hours, winter's compressed day — and the specific season depicted would define the colour and tonal structure of the whole.