The Acanthus Revival: Rosemaling in the Norwegian Fjords

Olav Bergstrøm's workshop is a barn outside Lom, in the upper Gudbrandsdal valley, where the Lågen river still runs the colour of grey glass. Inside, on a stool worn shiny by four generations of trousers, Olav is painting an acanthus leaf onto the side of an ale bowl. He is seventy-one. He is, until next summer, the last full-time rosemaler in this valley.

Rosemaling — "rose painting" — was a folk response to the Baroque. In the 1750s, itinerant painters fanned out from Bergen and Hallingdal into the rural fjords, bringing with them the swirling acanthus, the festoon, the cartouche — motifs ripped from city churches and city furniture. Each valley refined the borrowing into its own dialect. Telemark style is loose and asymmetrical; Hallingdal is tighter and more disciplined; Os style, from west of Bergen, is unmistakable for its bright reds and its compositional bravery.

What is curious is that rosemaling almost died twice. Once in the late nineteenth century, when the Norwegian middle class became embarrassed by anything that smelled of the peasantry, and again in the 1960s, when minimalism made every painted cupboard look, suddenly, like a relative one was glad lived far away. Both times it was Norwegian-Americans in the Upper Midwest who kept the tradition alive — Vesterheim, the museum in Decorah, Iowa, runs the most serious rosemaling certification programme in the world to this day.

Now the pendulum has swung back. Olav has eleven apprentices on his books this year, which is more than he has had since 1989. Six of them are women under thirty. Two are Sámi, which would have been unthinkable when Olav started: rosemaling was never a Sámi art form, and the cultural negotiation is delicate. "They are not making rosemaling Sámi," Olav says carefully. "They are saying: this is also a Norwegian language, and we live here, and we want to speak it."

The renewed appetite is partly economic. A hand-painted Hallingdal-style kubbestol — the carved log chair — fetches around 90,000 NOK at auction, more than a small car. But it is also generational. The grandchildren of the people who threw the painted cupboards out are the ones now bidding to bring them home.

I sit with Olav for the better part of a day. He paints, mostly. He tells me about a friend, a rosemaler in Gol, who was hired last year to repaint the interior of a stave church and broke down crying when he saw the original layers underneath, painted in 1742 by someone he did not know but instantly understood. "He recognized the man's hand," Olav says. "That is what we are. Hands recognizing hands across centuries."

Towards evening, his apprentice Mette joins us. She is 26, trained as an architect, and walked away from a job in Oslo to come here. She paints an acanthus leaf in seven brushstrokes — root, two outer curls, three inner, the highlight — without lifting the brush. "It is closer to handwriting than to drawing," she tells me. "Once you have it, you have it."

Olav watches her in silence, then nods once. From a Norwegian master, that is roughly the equivalent of a parade.