Norway got a constitution in 1814 and a visual identity about thirty years later, painted largely in Düsseldorf by Norwegians who had to go abroad to learn how. Room 045 is that project, room 049 is its grandiose historical wing, and room 064 is where it became children's books.
Tidemand's Low Church Devotion against Peterssen's Christian II. Twenty-seven years between them, both indoors, both about authority and a text. One is a document of a living movement, the other a costume drama. Which of the painters believed his own picture?
Gigapixel image. The museum's text says the picture "has been revered as an 'icon' by generations of Norwegians". Two painters have painted one canvas, so find the seam between Gude's landscape and Tidemand's figures. The stave church, the fjord and the costumes are assembled from different places.
A lay preacher in a smoke-blackened farmhouse. The Haugians were followers of Hans Nielsen Hauge, the lay preacher who had travelled Norway fifty years earlier. Düsseldorf technique applied to a Norwegian religious revival. Bjørnson, the poet, is supposed to have said that he could not have written his peasant tales without Tidemand.
Tidemand's peasant portraits (also Sella Larsdatter Vikør and The Farmer Torstein Ringheim from Voss) show people with names, not types. Compare with Biard's two portraits of a youth from Kautokeino (1839) in the same room. A French painter's Sámi sitters have no names.
The church Dahl helped to save, painted before it was understood as heritage. Tycho Jæger's Urnes Church in Sogn (1853) shows it afterwards.
Room 049, together with Arbo's The Valkyrie (1869). The museum's text says the starting point was above all Welhaven's poem of the same title from 1844.
Room 049. The death warrant of 1517 led indirectly to the king's fall, says the museum's text; the adviser in black and the queen in white lean in towards the king from either side. The other half of the pair below.
Room 049. History painting, the genre Europe considered the highest, arrived in Norway just as Europe gave it up.
Room 064. Kittelsen's fairy-tale pictures, also Askeladden (1900) and White Bear King Valemon (1912), together with August Cappelen's forest studies from 1851, which taught him the forest. The national romance ends in the nursery.
What is the Bridal Procession arguing for, and to whom, in 1848, the year of revolutions?
What did a Norwegian need from Harald Fairhair in 1870?
Who bought these pictures? The Bridal Procession came to the gallery in 1895, after half a century of prints and tableaux. Read the acquisition lines: gifts from merchants, and "bought from the artist". Then ask what Kumu in Tallinn did with the same problem in its rooms for the nineteenth century: a people painting itself into existence under someone else's academy. There it was St Petersburg and Düsseldorf, here Copenhagen and Düsseldorf.
Describe the pictures from memory, without looking at them, and record a voice note.