Dr Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) both embodied and created symbols within the Norwegian movement for independence at the turn of the century. Somewhat of a workaholic, his jobs included scientist, explorer, delegate to the League of Nations, and Rector of St Andrews. This made him one of the most celebrated men in Norway and a representative for the country abroad. He initially gained international renown due to his polar expeditions. In 1888, Nansen’s team was the first to cross the interior of Greenland, and while his attempt to reach the North Pole (1893-1896) ultimately failed, it broke the record for the northernmost latitude reached.
Nansen was also an amateur artist, but—much to his own chagrin—he never quite reached the heights he achieved in other fields. While he exhorted St Andrews students to “burn boats […] then one loses no time in looking behind,”[1] he said of his own artistic efforts, “I see something beautiful that I should like to bring out perhaps, but the power is lacking.”[2] He refused to exhibit, despite the encouragement of his close friend, the famed Norwegian artist Erik Werenskiold (1855-1938).[3] However, his artistic modesty should not be overstated—he still left his artworks in the care of institutions, including St Andrews, and was happy to send his self-portraits out as Christmas greetings cards.
The five artworks in the University’s collection reveal Nansen’s hopes for his legacy. Comprising two Arctic scenes and three self-portraits, they show his journey from national fame to international renown. I was able to travel to Oslo to find out more about Nansen, the artworks exhibited in the house he designed (Polhøgda), and the Fram Museum (which displays the ship he used in his Arctic expedition of 1893-1896). They helped me to understand and contextualise the St Andrews collection, which I now believe centre Nansen’s Norwegian identity, one shaped by the independence movement.
The two Arctic scenes are lithographs (Figures 1 and 2), a medium Nansen learned as a young man and utilised in his scientific papers.[4] Lithographs are a type of print: the artist uses an oily crayon to create a drawing and the ink applied evenly on top sticks to this oiled surface when put through a press. In his later years, Nansen created many landscapes featuring polar bears, as the prints kept in Polhøgda and the Fram Museum attest. At such a remove from his Arctic expedition, he would use his own pen drawings and photographs of polar bears at Christiania Zoo as references.[5]
Lithograph print of a polar bear in the snow by Fridtjof Nansen is currently on display at the Wardlaw Museum (Figure 1). The monochrome print makes brilliant use of its limited colour range, the grey gradient of the sky suggesting a sunrise without Nansen needing to use colour. The dark colours confined to the top section give the piece an oppressive atmosphere, increasing the threat of the distant polar bear. Nansen’s expedition to the North, deemed “the most stirring event of the decade,”[6] was a unifying moment for Norway, then still under Swedish rule.
Such Arctic scenes could be seen as assertions of Nansen as an icon of the national movement. In the late nineteenth century, Norway did not have its own art academy, so artists went abroad to study, particularly to Germany.[7] Here they absorbed German notions of ‘the Sublime’, which erodes the psychological division between nature’s beauty and terror. On their return to Norway, these young artists became increasingly concerned with creating their own national style, often by looking to Norway’s rich folk culture for inspiration. Nansen’s lithographs, on the other hand, are stylistically in line with his scientific background.
In the (undated) Polar Scene (Figure 2), a polar bear towers over a group of dogs, a symbol of human encroachment into the Arctic. The leftmost dog has been captured mid-bound, giving the veristic sense that the image has been created at the very moment of threat. Nansen’s focus on his personal experiences with nature is representative of the Norwegian artistic appetite for a style ‘untainted’ by international influence.
This lithograph led me to research and unearth a gruesome aspect of Nansen’s use of sled dogs in his Fram expedition. With limited space on the sleds, Nansen had to prioritise food for the men. Therefore, the dog pack became both consumer and source of its own sustenance. This was a weight on Nansen’s conscience, “the need for killing them one at a time to supply food for their companions was an unpleasant task […]. Only when the dogs were famished would some of them eat the meat.”[8]
A head-and-shoulders pencil self-portrait, dated November 1925 and currently hanging in the Wardlaw wing of University Hall, is dedicated “to the students of St Andrews University” (Figure 3). It uses strong directional lighting to illuminate Nansen’s profile in bright light which emphasises his wrinkles. Yet, instead of making Nansen seem vulnerable, the range of tones gives him an aura of strength, suggesting that he is an ideal representative of Norway in the various political positions he held around Europe. Moreover, his highlighted profile could be symbolic of a bright future, an implicit promise for the young nation which, in the year that Nansen became Rector of St Andrews, was only two decades old. Ultimately, this piece presents the subject and artist as an active elder statesman, a man whose work for Europe (such as the invention of “Nansen passports” for stateless refugees) brought visibility to his homeland.
The two other self-portraits (Figures 4 and 5) – a 1930 pen drawing and an undated lithograph – maintain many of the qualities seen in the 1925 work. The 1930 drawing (whose rear inscription indicates that it was given by Principal Irvine to hang between the dining room windows of McIntosh Hall) demonstrates that visible strokes were part of Nansen’s style (Figure 4). The careful crosshatching is light, without the deep shadows of the 1925 self-portrait. It is clearly related to other more developed self-portraits held by the Fram Museum and Polhøgda (Figures 6 and 7).
The Fram Museum also possesses an identical print of the final self-portrait in the University collection (Figure 5), which it dates to 1924 (Figure 8). Another print hangs in Polhøgda (Figure 9), whose curator told me that Nansen would send his self-portraits as Christmas greetings. His reworking and dissemination of his self-portraits show that he was concerned with his legacy, making and recreating his own image to control how he was presented.
These works in the University’s collection demonstrate how Nansen used image-making to convey certain ideas internationally. His representations of his “epoch-making”[9] Arctic expeditions communicated to St Andrews students the thrill of his pioneering adventures. They fully embraced their Rector’s adventurous spirit, decorating his train carriage to St Andrews with “a grotesque polar bear attired in scarlet gown with mortar board complete.”[10] At the same time, he used the self-portraits to characterise himself not as a young explorer, but as a dignified political champion of Norway.
You can explore Nansen’s works in an Exhibit at this link.
Blog written by Stella McVey, University of St Andrews student and Laidlaw Research Scholar.
[1] Fridtjof Nansen, Adventure, and Other Papers (London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1927), 27.
[2] Jon Sörensen, The Saga of Fridtjof Nansen, trans. J.B.C. Watkins (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932), 140.
[3] Sörensen, The Saga, 354.
[4] Sörensen, The Saga, 355.
[5] Leif Østby, Fridtjof Nansen the Artist, trans. Geir O. Kløver (Oslo: The Fram Museum, 2023), 243.
[6] Karen Larsen, History of Norway (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 482. https://doi-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/10.1515/9781400875795.
[7] Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén, “Territorialising Nature,” in A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910, ed. Leena Ahtola-Moorhouse, Frode Ernst Haverkamp, and Torsten Gunnarson (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2006), 219.
[8] E. E. Reynolds, Nansen (London: G. Bles, 1932), 108.
[9] Larsen, History of Norway, 483.
[10] Newspaper “Rousing Welcome to Dr Nansen,” Dundee Courier, 3 Nov. 1926