Borgøya Island

I just finished reading this wonderfully depressing novel by Jon Fosse. It is about the Norwegian landscape painter Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), whose strange paintings I wrote about here a decade ago. I was writing then about a TV programme in which Andrew Graham-Dixon suggested that Hertervig's traumatic move from a poor farm on the west coast of Norway to the city of Düsseldorf was like the shock of Norway's transition from a rural backwater to a modern state. Here's how I related the artist's sad story, which inspired John Fosse's Melancholy I-II:

One day, Hertervig, who had fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of his landlady in Düsseldorf, was told that a rendezvous had been arranged with her. But when he arrived to meet her he found no one there but a bunch of bullying, mocking students. This practical joke contributed to a depression which led him to return to Norway, where he was placed in the asylum at Gaustad. After eighteen months, 'incurably insane', Hertervig went home to his family.

That terrible bullying experience at the hands of his fellow painters is powerfully evoked through interior monologue in the first part of the book. In Part 2 we find Hertervig suffering in the Gaustad asylum, while Part 3 is told from the perspective of a modern-day writer who has an emotional, quasi-religious experience in front of Hertervig's painting Borgøya Island. The fourth part, Melancholy II, was added in 1996 and is perhaps the most upsetting section of all, tracing the thoughts of Hertervig's elderly, incontinent sister during the course of one afternoon, soon after his death in 1902.

Lars Hertervig, Borgøya Island, 1867

While reading the first part of the novel, set on that fateful day in the Autumn of 1853, I was curious to know more about the "painters who can't paint", as Hertervig describes his contemporaries. He excludes from this judgement Hans Bude, the Düsseldorf Art Academy's young Norwegian tutor. Hertervig, in the novel, frets about whether Bude will criticise his art, although when they meet each other in the street Bude is encouraging. It wasn't artistic criticism that precipitated Hertervig's breakdown. Fosse also mentions 'Tidemann' who I took to be Adolph Tidemand, another older Norwegian artist. Tidemand's talent for figure painting led him to collaborate with Gude on landscape scenes like the Bridal Procession I have reproduced below. The place where all these painters used to meet up in Düsseldorf was Malkasten, which I imagined as a large beer hall full of students. In fact it was a renowned artist's association ('Malkasten' means Painter's Box) which in Hertervig's day hired out restaurant rooms. Malkasten was founded in 1848 and is still going today, having undergone numerous changes over the years (they now have a bar 'where art meets gastronomy').

Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude, Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord, 1848 

When Hertervig first enters Malkasten, already in a fragile state, he encounters 'Alfred', who will later go out of his way to deceive him into thinking Helene, the girl he loves, is sitting somewhere at the back of the bar. There were a few real artists at that time called Alfred, but I am guessing he is not based on an actual person? (If any Fosse or Hertervig experts are reading this, feel free to put me right!) Another artist we encounter is 'Müller' who must be Morten Müller (1828-1911), a painter whose views of fjords and pine forests can be seen in Norway's National Gallery. 'Capellen' is briefly mentioned too, presumably August Capellen (1827-52) although he died of cancer the year before the novel is set and doesn't appear as a character. Alfred's main accomplice is 'Bodom' and he too was a real person, the Norwegian landscape painter Erik Bodom (1829-79) who Hertervig admits "can paint. But Bodom is not as good a painter as I am." 

Erik Bodom, Landscape with a Waterfall, 1855

As Hertervig talks to Bodom he is increasingly confused with sexual delusions, visions of Helene and images from his past life on Borgøya Island. Something is clearly wrong... 

This is your first time at Malkasten, isn't it, he says.
And I look straight into Bodom's eyes, and his eyes are grinning, I see Bodom's eyes grinning and just like that his eyes turn into bog-holes, black, wet, and then someone pulling, sinking, splashing in the bog, hard, the hand moves fast, pulls up, down, tightens, tightens, and I can't pull my foot free and it's stuck and then, up ahead, is the light that sucks and comes at me and pulls me down...