Halfdan Egedius: Dr&3x00F8;mmeren. En tradisjonell analyse.

The paper aims at presenting and analyzing The Dreamer, a major work by the Norwegian painter Halfdan Egedius (1877-99). The painting was executed during the summer 1895, when Egedius was staying at Bø in the rural district of Telemark. It is mentioned quite frequently in the artist's correspondence, where he used to refer to it simply as a portrait of his friend and fellow artist Torleiv Stadskleiv. The composition is straight enough, the model being placed on a log-chair in the middle of a peasant interior typical of the district. The colour scheme is simple, based on strong, saturated hues arranged in striking contrast. A dark-haired man dressed in black Sits quietly, resting his head upon his hand and seemingly wrapped in his own thought. The idea for such an arrangement may derive from Edvard Munch's famous Night, painted at St. Cloud in 1890, where a brooding figure is placed in somewhat the same way in an interior lit from outside. Stadskleiv's peculiarly twisted pose, on the other hand, is directly dependent on Eilif Peterssen's portrait of Arne Garborg (1894), although in a more general sense it harks back to Rodin's famous Penseur and ultimately to the dark figure of Heraclitus in the School of Athens. Indeed, the portrait of Stadskleiv belongs within the long tradition of representations of the melancholy complexion. It was not made to commission and may rather be seen as a symbolic depiction of the inspired artist as such. The idea of a melancholy temper and its close connection with artistic creativity was of course well known at the time: the Finnish artist Magnus Enckell, for instance, executed a large painting with the title Melancholy the very same year. It should be added, perhaps, that the poet and journalist Arne Garborg, a leading light of contemporary Scandinavian culture, was known for his profound and brooding intellect. Stadskleiv himself was quite a character. A native of Bø he became to the town-boy Egedius something of a personification of the characteristic, traditional peasant culture of Telemark. He had a taste for the occult and was even given to superstitious beliefs. The two young painters were exceptionally close friends and stuck together a lot, not least during the summer 1895. It appears from Egedius' correspondence that Stadskleiv painted his friend's portrait more or less at the time the Dreamer was completed. Insistent allusions to the local rural milieu and Norwegian peasant culture are not accidental. Egedius had close connections to a circle of painters holding that true art must be national in character. In the Dreamer he consistently kept to colours and colour combinations which were at the same time propagated by the art historian Andreas Aubert as representative of the particular «Norwegian instinct for colours», and which were referred to by the painter Gerhard Munthe as a «national Norwegian choice of colours». Indeed, the Dreamer appears not only as the artist, but as the truly Norwegian artist as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]