Peasant Woman from Normandy

Although Asta Nørregaard was known for her portraits, she was also a skilled genre and landscape painter. 

Peasant Woman from Normandy is an example of one of these "genre paintings", where figures, everyday life, or depictions of work are the motifs. 

In the late 1880s, Nørregaard spent a period of time in Normandy, in the north of France. There, she found several motifs in the countryside. 

She – and several other Norwegian artists at the time – were inspired both by older French realism and by the life they saw around them.

Nørregaard painted group pictures of working people in landscape settings, that in style and motif, testify to impulses from French realists such as Bastien-Lepage. 

She processed the pictures so that they give an original and independent impression, as can be seen in, for example, the painting Knitting Girl or this picture, Peasant Woman from Normandy.