The Apple Cart

This 1876 work on cardboard depicts an apple cart, a quotidian rural subject that reflects the early phase of Munthe's career, when he was absorbing the naturalist influences that were reshaping Norwegian painting. The mid-1870s saw Norwegian painters returning from training in Munich and engaging with the democratic subject matter — rural labour, everyday objects, ordinary landscapes — that the naturalist movement had validated against academic hierarchies of subject. The apple cart was the kind of humble, seasonal working object that nationalist-inflected naturalism celebrated as authentically Norwegian. Munthe was twenty-five in 1876, still in the early stages of his professional practice, and works on cardboard from this period likely function as studies or rapidly observed compositional notes rather than formally finished exhibition pieces. The National Museum's collection includes several of Munthe's early works alongside the more celebrated decorative work for which he became known later in his career.

Working on cardboard gives the surface an absorbent, slightly rough quality that affects paint behaviour. The medium promotes directness and immediacy, with marks setting more quickly than on primed canvas. Munthe uses this to produce a fresh, unworked quality appropriate to the humble subject matter and the observational impulse that drove early naturalist practice.