The poor Man's Field

Painted in 1877, 'The Poor Man's Field' carries explicit social meaning in its title that is relatively unusual within Norwegian landscape painting of the period, which more typically implied rural social content through subject matter without naming it directly. A poor man's field — small, marginal, possibly less productive — locates the landscape within a specific social and economic context: the tenant farmer, the smallholder, those who worked the land without owning it in a society where land ownership determined status and security. The 1870s were a period of significant social tension in Norway as the modernisation of agriculture and early industrialisation began to disrupt traditional rural social structures. Munthe's attention to this marginal subject at the beginning of his career may reflect a genuine social consciousness or, more simply, the direct painting of what was immediately visible and available in the landscape around him. The work is now in the National Museum alongside his more typical landscape studies from the same period.

The painting likely depicts a modest piece of cultivated or semi-cultivated ground with whatever crops or vegetation it supported, framed by the natural landscape around it. The visual distinction between a poor man's field and a prosperous farm painting might lie in the quality of the cultivation — smaller plots, simpler structures, less productive-looking land — reflected in the compositional choice of what to include and emphasise.