Summer Landscape from Florø

Frederik Collett was a Norwegian landscape painter who worked in the tradition of naturalist observation established by the Hague School and the French Barbizon painters. This 1887 summer landscape from Florø — a coastal town in western Norway — is characteristic of his outdoor practice, finding material in the quiet, intimate Norwegian coastal landscape rather than the dramatic fjords and mountains favored by earlier Romantic painters. The modest, everyday character of this western coastal setting reflects the more democratic attitude to landscape subject matter that characterized Norwegian naturalism in the 1880s.

Collett renders the summer coastal landscape in warm, light tones characteristic of the Norwegian summer — the pale northern sunlight on water and vegetation handled with direct, atmospheric brushwork. The composition is quiet and horizontal, with the particularity of the Florø coastline preserved without dramatic emphasis.