A Norweigan Harbour

I lean towards oils more than watercolours, but something grabbed me about this one. I like a challenge, and if it's a good painting, I have a good success rate in finding the artist and opening up the painting's history. The story is always very important to me.

The quality is genuinely high, not a competent amateur piece. The reflections in the water, the handling of the masts, the crowd on the quayside, the architectural detail of those timber buildings... the Norwegian flags. It has the feel of someone who knew this harbour well, possibly a local artist or someone who spent real time there. The flags and the specific character of the buildings suggest this could be identifiable as a real location. Time to start digging. 

 A grand oak frame like that suggests the owner valued it seriously, or possibly that it was framed to exhibition standard at some point. Exhibition framing of watercolours in Scandinavia and Britain in the late Victorian and Edwardian period was often substantial.

So we have a harbour painting with a monogram lower left. bma? hna? lma? with a swirl around. It's an unusual frame for a watercolour, quite grand and beautiful wood, probably oak.

This came from an auction in Fife, a region with strong historical connections with Scandinavia through the old North Sea trading routes, and Norwegian and Scandinavian works turning up at Scottish provincial auctions is not unusual at all. It's also very close to Edinburgh and Glasgow, two very important cities for Art.

The rear of the painting is always important and is not very often shown by auctioneers online. I had to wait until I picked it up before I could get more answers, but I was happy I had enough detail to make it a worthy venture. Sold.

Now it's back home, I can have a good stare at it. The building arrangement, the specific character of the quayside, and the flags could point to a particular town. Western Norway ports like Stavanger, Bergen, Haugesund, or smaller fishing towns along that coast had very distinctive timber warehousing. Someone in a Norwegian local history or maritime history group might place it immediately from the image alone.

On the back, we have a dealer's label - Doig, Wilson & Wheatley. But no written details about the artist. Doig, Wilson & Wheatley, 90 George Street, Edinburgh. Fine Art Dealers and Printsellers, Picture Restorers and Framers. By Special Appointment to Her Late Majesty Queen Victoria. Well lets say its after 1901 then, if the label is to be believed.

The art is held in with a lovely wooden board, the type you'd struggle to find in the wild now. There's a very light scratching on it I spotted with a raking light. Back to brass rubbing, like a child, I watch as the letters appear ... "Bergen". Now we are getting somewhere. 

The monogram is the key, and I haven't cracked it. The best macro shot we have shows a tall first letter, a flowing middle section, and an open final letter. I have been reading it as Dina, but that is one reading among several. I've found a Norwegian artist named Dina Aschehoug, but it's tricky to find a monogram on her work, which isn't widely shown. What is available is markedly different from this watercolour, and a first name is a rarity as a signature. It could be DMA too...

Having exhausted lists of Norwegian artists from the period, I think the single most productive next step is putting the painting in front of people who know Bergen. A post in a Bergen local history group with the harbour image and the monogram image, asking two simple questions: do you recognise this specific quayside view, and does anyone recognise this monogram? 

Someone in Bergen may answer both questions...