Vågåsommeren or the Vågå Summer was a Norwegian artists' collective which came together in

Vågå Vågå () is a List of municipalities of Norway, municipality in Innlandet county, Norway. It is located in the Traditional districts of Norway, traditional district of Gudbrandsdal. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of ...

Innlandet Innlandet is a Counties of Norway, county in Norway. It was created on 1 January 2020 with the merger of the old counties of Oppland and Hedmark (Jevnaker Municipality and Lunner Municipality were transferred to the neighboring county of Viken ( ...

County A county () is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposesL. Brookes (ed.) '' Chambers Dictionary''. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, 2005. in some nations. The term is derived from the Old French denoti ...

, in 1894. It consisted of ten painters, all of whom had spent the previous year studying art at

Harriet Backer Harriet Backer (21 January 1845 – 25 March 1932) was a Norwegian painter who achieved recognition in her own time and was a pioneer among female artists both in the Nordic countries and in Europe generally. She is best known for her detailed ...

's school in

Kristiania Oslo ( or ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of 1,064,235 in 2022, an ...

(today's Oslo). They were looking for a more relaxed approach to painting than the strict, clear-cut Realism of the times. Kristen Holbø, together with his good friend and fellow student Halfdan Egedius, both from Vågå, invited their fellow students to spend the summer in the area. The men, including Thorvald Erichsen, Alfred Hauge, Lars Jorde and Oluf Wold-Torne, stayed with Holbø in his house on the Holbø estate while the four women, Johanna Bugge Berge, Lalla Hvalstad, Alice Pihl and Kris Torne were accommodated in Sygard Storvik, a large two-story house in Sjårdalen which belonged to Egedius' father. The get-together started in May and lasted until September. It was remembered not just for the considerable efforts devoted to painting but as a social success for all concerned. The artists concentrated on mood paintings, often creating landscapes in the summer evenings, with darker colours and a more simplified style than they had been taught at art school. Despite the rather rainy summer, the event was thought to have been a huge success, resulting in many fine paintings. They were exhibited in September in the local school, while several of the artists returned to Kristiania with works in the newly developed style. The gathering later became known as Vågåsommeren or the Vågå Summer.

References

{{Reflist Artist colonies 19th-century Norwegian painters Norwegian art Norwegian artists groups and collectives Vågå