Text by Senior Communications Advisor Ellisiv Brattfjord
She fell in love with the bog landscape without even being aware of the bog's unique value as a carbon store, flood absorber and home to many endangered species; things we have since come to appreciate.
Kitty Kielland wrote in a letter to her artist friend Eilif Peterssen in the summer of 1878: "It is a miserable struggle with the fierce wind, which drives sand into your head through your eyes and ears, mixes into all your paints on the palette and finally covers the whole study. I get so annoyed that I quarrel with all my might. The wind answers with clouds of sand and violent gusts of wind". This makes sense; Kitty Kielland was an outdoors painter.
Kielland was the first Norwegian artist to capture the landscape in Jæren with a paintbrush. She was here almost every summer from the time she first discovered the picturesque potential of the barren nature. Kielland cast her gaze first over the beaches and the sea and created paintings such as Fra Kvianes på Ogna, Jæren (From Kvianes at Ogna, Jæren) (1878). She focused on the rocks, sand and sparse vegetation that grew between old stone fences. But then she discovered the peat bogs, which in the 19th century covered large parts of Jæren. They created a horizontal and treeless landscape, with vast skies, something the artist associated with a form of freedom, according to Inger M. L. Gudmundson, art historian and curator at Stavanger Art Museum, and currently completing Norway's first doctorate on Kitty Kielland.
"The peat bogs offered a diversity and an ambiguity that fascinated her. Here she could paint realistic scenes with farmers at work and neo-romantic mood paintings with skies, clouds and cotton-grass reflected in the bog pools. The tree roots that were dug out of the bog reminded her of the landscape's history and opportunities for change; it was unploughed land", says Gudmundson.
The valuable peat bog
Peat bogs
- Bogs cover around 9.8 per cent of the land area of Norway and are a type of wetland.
- Peat is formed by moss, grass, leaves and other organic material remaining in water-rich areas for a long time. Due to lack of oxygen, the material does not decompose fully.
- Over the years, peat has been extracted for building materials, gardening and fuel, among other things.
- It takes nature several thousand years to make a peat bog. The bog grows only one millimetre a year, so a bog that is five metres deep is around 5000 years old.
- Norwegian bogs store at least 950 million tonnes of carbon. This corresponds to 66 years of Norway's annual greenhouse gas emissions.
- According reports from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, 85 per cent of the world's wetlands have disappeared.
- In Norway, one-third of the country's bogs have been removed in the last 70 years.
- According to figures from the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO), around 2600 decares of bog have been cultivated every year between 2007 and 2015 in Norway.
- With effect from 2 June 2020, the Norwegian government banned cultivation of bogs, but local municipalities still have the option of allowing cultivation when certain conditions are met.
The artist in the bog
Kitty Kielland
- Christine Lange Kielland (Kitty) was born in Stavanger on 8 October 1843.
- The Kiellands were an affluent family that had lived in Stavanger for several generations.
- Painting became more than a hobby for Kielland after a long illness where she had little else to do.
- In the 1870s she studied under Hans Gude in Karlsruhe in Germany and later under Eilif Peterssen and H. Baisch in Munich.
- She lived and studied in Paris for several years, together with Harriet Backer, among others.
- Kielland fought for women's right to participate fully in art and highlighted differences in the upbringing of boys and girls.
- She was involved in the founding of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights in 1884.
- Kielland was one of the first Norwegian artists to paint what would become known as neo-romantic mood paintings.
- Kielland exhibited often during her lifetime and participated in all the most important Nordic and international exhibitions where Norwegian artists were represented.
- Before she died in 1914, she bequeathed a large sum to the National Gallery for the procurement of Norwegian art, on condition that the artwork "breaks with tradition and adds new elements to the development of art".
Unique nature
