Bird on a Stone

Nikolai Astrup worked as both a painter and a printmaker. Though painting was his main field, his prints demonstrate the same originality and artistic quality. Astrup’s main passion was for landscapes. His depictions are closely linked to his local community, Jølster in Sunnfjord in Western Norway, which he knew well ever since childhood. He was particularly fascinated by the diverse moods created by the changing of the seasons and the ever-shifting weather, with the distinctive landscape formations serving as a fixed point of reference. In colour woodcuts Astrup found a medium that was particularly well-suited for retaining parts of an image and varying others. By combining prints from a fixed plate with plates where he had changed certain parts of the image and the colours, he could depict a variety of moods, even as the landscape was largely the same. While the conventional method in colour prints is to use a single plate for each colour, Astrup often painted several colours on a single plate, and he also frequently painted directly on the print. It is the prints’ tonal vibrancy that instils his colour woodcuts with the characteristics of painting.

All the variants that Astrup made of Bird on a Stone are spring pictures. The differences are largely aesthetic, although he once noted in a letter on two particular versions that he envisioned the first one as a day or evening mood and the second one as a nocturnal spring mood. The picture is typified by its decorative elements, and its light, lyrical tone has made this woodcut one of Astrup’s most popular.