Painting thrived in Norway in the seventeenth century, but under conditions that privileged copying as a dominant principle since most painters made their living by copying prints for church interiors. The country, which was under the rule of the Danish crown, underwent great economic improvements much thanks to its well-developed commercial trade relations with the Netherlands and Germany. Economic growth went hand in hand with a more than doubling of the population, and around three hundred church new church buildings were erected. Many of the medieval churches were also refurbished and redecorated to meet the requirements from the Lutheran Reformation. This had a profound effect on the domestic artistic production. Painters were hired to paint altarpieces and epitaphs, and to decorate walls and other kind of furniture. To their help they had prints produced in Antwerp and Amsterdam from which they copied religious motifs. Imitating the work of others was common practice. Early modern visual culture in Norway thus consisted of a hybrid of repeated images originating from the artistic centers of north-western Europe.

This paper is about Elias Fiigenshough, one of the most prolific painters in Norway in the seventeenth century. The paper also aims to demonstrate the importance of prints as catalysts for the development and nurturing of local traditions of paintings in the early modern period. 

In contrast to other painters of the same period, Fiigenschoug copied prints after only one painter, Rubens. His preference for Rubens distinguishes him from his contemporaries in Norway. Fiigenschoug’s works include epitaphs for St. Mary’s church in Bergen and several paintings for single-panel altarpieces for small town parish churches. They were all painted between 1640 and 1650, ant the motifs were copied from prints after Rubens’s designs. Like most other painters working in Norway in the seventeenth century, Fiigenshoug was an emigrant. From where, however, is uncertain. We do not know where he received his training or whether he had the opportunity to see Rubens original works. 

As late as in 2016, the art historian and curator Antony Griffiths chose to describe prints as ‘a crutch for the poor artist’, explaining that ‘painters working in the provinces or at the lower levels of the market in every country, as well as those who found themselves in the margins of Europe in countries with no strong local tradition of painting, constantly lifted entire compositions that they found in prints.’ (Griffith 2016). In recent years, however, art historians have turned their attention to how a shared, global visual culture was constructed from the dissemination and circulation of Flemish and Dutch graphic prints in the early modern period (Stephanie Porras 2023; Aaron Hyman 2021; Karr Schmidt & Wouk 2017). 

We need to move away from negative attitudes towards copying, such as Griffiths’s, in order to shed light on painters such as Fiigenshoug, and to analyse the conditions that privileged copying as a dominant principle in regions outside of the artistic centers of Western Europe.