In March

Gerhard Munthe was a Norwegian painter and decorative artist who contributed significantly to the development of a national Norwegian visual style in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This 1890 canvas titled 'In March' belongs to the period of his mature naturalistic practice, when he was among the central figures of Norwegian landscape painting under the influence of the broader Nordic naturalist movement. March in Norway occupies the transitional moment between winter and spring — snow still covers the ground but the light has changed, the sun sits higher, and the landscape carries the first intimations of thaw. This liminal seasonal moment had strong appeal for Scandinavian painters who were alert to the emotional and visual qualities of seasonal transition. Munthe had been associated with the artists' colony at Fleskum in Bærum in the 1880s, where several of the most important Norwegian naturalist painters worked together on outdoor studies. The National Museum in Oslo, where this work is now held, preserves the largest collection of Munthe's paintings.

March light in Scandinavia has a particular quality — bright but still cold, with long shadows from a sun not yet high in the sky, and the blued shadows of snow still covering much of the landscape. Munthe renders this through a tonal palette that mixes cool whites and blues in the shadow areas with warmer creams and yellows in the sunlit surfaces.