Image: National Museum of Fine Arts, Argentina, Buenos Aires
The National Museum of Fine Arts has highlighted Frits Thaulow’s ‘Orillas del río en primavera’ in its #LaObraDelDía daily artwork feature. The museum identifies the work as an Impressionist-style view of a riverbank and notes that it was acquired by Eduardo Schiaffino in 1906.
The brief description locates the Norwegian painter’s treatment of landscape between two named artistic concerns. While the riverbank scene is described through its Impressionist style, the museum says Thaulow’s empathetic view of nature also brings him close to Symbolist concerns. That phrasing gives the painting a precise place within the museum’s daily focus: a landscape work characterised both by an Impressionist manner and by the artist’s feeling for the natural world.
Thaulow (1847–1906) was a central figure in the development of modern art in Norway. During the early 1880s, his fresh, colourful plein-air paintings attracted enthusiasm and provoked controversy in Norwegian art circles. After settling permanently in France in 1892, he became especially associated with technically assured paintings of moving water, winter scenes and nocturnes.
His work has also been discussed in relation to naturalism, Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Symbolism.
