Flower Meadow in the North

A field of white flowers spreads across the foreground like a bright carpet, glowing against the dark greens of the Norwegian countryside. Above it all, a pale moon hangs in a milky sky, casting a strange half-light over the whole scene. Two small red farm buildings sit tucked to the left, tiny against the wide valley and the hills rolling back toward the horizon. This is a summer night in the far north, where the sun barely sets and the light lingers long after it should be dark.

Harald Sohlberg painted this in 1905, and it belongs to the tradition of Norwegian landscape painting that leaned toward mood and symbolism rather than plain realism. Sohlberg was fascinated by the northern light and the feeling of solitude in nature, themes he returned to again and again. The daisies were painted from a real meadow he knew well, though the dreamlike glow he gave them owes more to memory and imagination than to any single evening. He is best remembered today for another work, "Winter Night in the Mountains," but this flowering field shows the same eye for a landscape caught somewhere between the real world and something more inward.