Portrait of the Painter Nils Hansteen

Erik Werenskiold, who would become one of the most important Norwegian painters and illustrators of the later 19th century, painted this early portrait of his fellow artist Nils Hansteen in 1877. Werenskiold was part of the generation of Norwegian painters who would transform national painting through their engagement with French Naturalism in the 1880s, and his early portrait of a fellow painter documents the artistic community from which that transformation would emerge. Hansteen was a Norwegian painter who died relatively young, and Werenskiold's portrait is among the significant documents of the younger generation of artists who gathered in Kristiania in the late 1870s.

Werenskiold renders his fellow painter with the direct, observational approach that would characterize his mature portraits — unposed, candid in its psychological address, with brushwork that prioritizes the quality of the face over decorative elegance.