Milling Weather
undefined undefined undefined, 1916 - 1916, 860 x 1050 mm
KODE Kunstmuseer og komponisthjem (KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes), Sparebankstiftelsen DnB
According to Astrup, kvennagong was “the name given to the type of autumn weather, necessary to ‘make the mill turn’”. The picture allows us a glimpse of how the people of Jølster made use of river rapids as a power source. A boy and a man carrying a sack of grain are headed towards a little mill to grind the grist into flour. To the left in the picture, we can see how the water is conducted towards the mill via a wooden trough. In the middle of the trough was a hatch that stemmed the flow of water in the trough so that it overflowed on both sides. When you opened the hatch, the trough conducted the water down to the paddles attached to the water wheel below the shed. We can see another mill in the background, behind a few slender, decoratively painted trees. The steep landscape and wet climate of Jølster provided good conditions for mills such as this one, and a majority of the farms had access to one.
The painting Milling Weather was executed in autumn 1916, and is a variation on Milling Weather (K174), which Astrup painted more than ten years earlier. In contrast to the first version, the format is about twice the size. The motif is reversed and rendered in a different colour scheme. The foreground and middle ground are mainly done in a broad range of green tones – from silver-green and white-green, to yellow-green and dark-green tone that verge on blue, which create a strong complementary contrast to the red colours in the background.
1916-1916:
Nikolai Astrup
(1880-1928)
1916-n.d.:
Moritz Kaland
(1869-1947)
-1927-1927-:
Thorvald Halvorsen
(1879-1950)
-1955-1971-:
Halfdan Arnold Grieg
(1907-1971)
-1971-1980-:
-1994-2005:
2005-current:
Sparebankstiftelsen DnB
Bergens Kunstforening. Nikolai Astrup 1880–1928. Mindeutstilling. Bergen: Bergens kunstforening, 1928.
Loge, Øystein. Nikolai Astrup: tradisjon og overskridelse. [Høvikodden]: Henie-Onstad kunstsenter, 1994.
“As mentioned it is one of the pictures, that I am fond of myself”, Astrup writes in his overview of his own works in 1927. Astrup also received positive feedback from his colleagues Nils Krantz and Moritz Kaland when they visited the artist in Jølster in the autumn of 1916. Soon after Astrup received an inquiry from Olav Ørvig in Bergen, but he declined to purchase the work. The high price that Astrup put on it – 1500 kroner, which buyers were not accustomed to – may have been a decisive factor. Astrup was in fact known for underpricing his works. The painting was sold via the art critic Per Korsvold the same year – for a much lower sum. The shipowner Thorvald Halvorsen is listed as the owner in 1927, but it is uncertain whether it was he who purchased the work in 1916.