From Kvianes på Ogna, Jæren

Kitty Kielland painted this early landscape from Kvianes in Ogna, on the Jæren plain of southwestern Norway, in 1878 — one of her first mature canvases made in a region that would define her artistic identity. Jæren is a flat coastal plain south of Stavanger characterised by windswept farmland, peat bogs, low scrub vegetation, and enormous, uninterrupted sky — a landscape unlike the forested mountains and fjords that most foreign visitors associated with Norway, and therefore of special interest to Norwegian painters seeking a distinctly Norwegian rather than generically Scandinavian subject. Kielland had returned from her studies in Düsseldorf and Munich with a solid academic foundation, and her early Jæren paintings show the German Naturalist influence in their careful tonal construction and attention to atmospheric conditions.

The flat Jæren terrain challenged Kielland to create spatial depth without the conventional devices of hill, forest, or architectural recession. She organised the composition around horizontal bands of land, low vegetation, and sky, making the sky — which occupies a large proportion of the canvas —