Asta Norregaard was a sought-after portrait painter among the rich and famous in Norway at the turn of the 20th century, but when she exhibited her work in the country\u2019s capital, critics were quick to dismiss her pictures as decorative and frivolous.<\/p>\n
The director of the National Gallery of Norway at the time, Jens Thiis, described Norregaard as a mere \u201cfashion portraitist\u201d of \u201chigh-society ladies.\u201d During his tenure, from 1908 to 1941, he did not buy a single Norregaard work for the museum.<\/p>\n
Today, the same Oslo institution, now called the National Museum, has revised its opinion and has brought together 48 of the painter\u2019s key works, mostly from private collections, for \u201cAsta Norregaard: Truth and Beauty,\u201d running through Oct. 18. It is the first major exhibition devoted to a painter almost unknown outside Scandinavia.<\/p>\n
The show\u2019s curator, Wenche Volle, has called Norregaard the \u201cSargent of Norway,\u201d referring to the great American Belle \u00c9poque painter John Singer Sargent.<\/p>\n
Norregaard, like Sargent, created high-society portraits that highlighted elegant settings of the sitters and the fine textures of the silk and satin gowns. Both artists were criticized for focusing on fashion and engaging in commercial portraiture, said Volle, but both were highly sought after by private clients and produced enduring images of prominent figures.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s the master of the portrait in his time, of course,\u201d Volle said in an interview. \u201cBut when I see her paintings, I think she can challenge him, and she can stand up against all the best painters of that time.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n
Norregaard was born in 1853 in Norway\u2019s capital, known as Christiania at the time. Her mother died that year in a cholera epidemic, and Norregaard became an orphan at 18 when her father also died. She never married and supported herself all her adult life as an independent artist.<\/p>\n
She trained as a painter first in Munich, and then in Paris, where she studied with teachers like Jean-L\u00e9on G\u00e9r\u00f4me and Jules Bastien-Lepage, major portraitists of the time.<\/p>\n
Although Norregaard also painted landscapes and biblical scenes, she achieved her greatest success after returning to Norway and finding her way into a milieu of wealthy and powerful men and pioneering women who were social reformers. Her 1911 self-published catalog of her work listed 327 pictures made in oil paints, charcoal and pastels, including a rare portrait of the artist Edvard Munch that she painted when he was 21.<\/p>\n
Like Sargent, Norregaard portrayed her female sitters as ambitious, complex and unconventional.<\/p>\n
Volle said that the \u201cmasterpiece\u201d of the exhibition was Norregaard\u2019s portrait of Elisabeth Fearnly, a Norwegian socialite and the wife of a shipping magnate, seated on the hide of a polar bear, whose teeth are visible just beside her feet. She appears composed in a black silk gown, with her eyes fixed on the viewer, as she twirls a sprig of lilac in her fingers.<\/p>\n
Erica Hirshler, a co-curator of the 2021 exhibition \u201cFashioned by Sargent,\u201d at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts<\/a>, which later went to Tate Britain in London<\/a>, said the portrait reminded her of Sargent\u2019s, \u201cLady Agnew of Lochnaw,\u201d which he painted the same year, 1892.<\/p>\n But she noted that Sargent\u2019s portraits of that era had more impressionistic, looser brushstrokes. For Sargent, Hirshler said, it was \u201cmore about the lusciousness of the paint.\u201d<\/p>\n Hirshler noted that artists from around the world trained in Paris in the late 19th century, and often returned home to produce Belle \u00c9poque-style portraits of \u201cthe great and the good,\u201d adjusted to the desires of the patrons of their own countries.<\/p>\n Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, to American parents and trained in Paris after an itinerant childhood. But after his portrait of \u201cMadame X\u201d caused a scandal in France in 1886 \u2014 her revealing dress with a strap that seemed about to fall off was considered indecent in Parisian society \u2014 he moved to London, where he became Britain\u2019s leading society portraitist. Norregaard moved back to Norway in 1889 and produced more than 200 portraits over the next two decades.<\/p>\n Barbara Dayer Gallati, a curator emerita of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum who has curated two exhibitions of Gilded Age portraits, said that \u201cportraiture really came into its own\u201d when the industrial revolution created a wealthy class whose members wanted to be remembered for their social stature.<\/p>\n Portraits were usually commissioned for a private homes or company headquarters, she said, but the owners would often loan them to charity exhibitions. By raising funds for orphanages and hospitals, the owners once again promoted their own social significance. \u201cIt was cultural currency,\u201d Gallati said. \u201cIf you had your portrait displayed, that enhanced your public persona.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, public interest in Gilded Age or Belle \u00c9poque portraits seems to be spiking. In the last five years, Sargent has been the subject of four major exhibitions in Boston, London, New York and Paris, all of which emphasized his society portraits and fashion.<\/p>\n