The dragon style in Norwegian decoration

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1997 by Widar Halen

In 1837 the Norwegian romantic painter Johan Christian Clausen Dahl (1788-1857) published a book about the country's stave churches that for the first time examined the dragon ornaments found on those medieval wooden buildings (see P1. IV).(1) He suggested that the stave church at Vang, which had been dismantled, be reerected as the royal chapel near the palace in Christiana (renamed Oslo in 1924). This wonderful plan never materialized, and the church was sold to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1795-1861) of Prussia, who took it to Silesia (now Poland), where it remains today.

The dragon motif came to Oslo when the landscape painter and decorator Flintoe incorporated a coiling dragon in his Empire style decoration of the royal in 1841 (see P1. VII). In Bergen, on the west coast of Norway, the decorative painter Johan Ludvig Losting (1810-1876) included dragons in festival banners and boat decorations in the 1850s and 1860s. Dragons were also used to decorate the frontispieces of an increasing number of books that were being published at the time about Norwegian archaeology and architecture. The vogue for three-dimensional dragon ornament result ed from the stylistic fusion of the Swiss chalet with the stave church and the rich archaeological finds from Viking sites. Remarkably well-preserved Viking ships were unearthed in Norway at Tune in 1867, at Gokstad in 1880, and in Oseberg in 1904 (see Pl. II). The ships and the stave churches made it clear that the dragon appeared more frequently in ancient Norwegian ornament than in that of any other Scandinavian country.

The Viking revival developed during the last third of the nineteenth century in all the Scandinavian countries, paralleling the Romanesque and Gothic revivals in the rest of Europe. In Norway it was known as the dragon style, and the vogue persisted, particularly with the dissolution of the union of Norway and Sweden in 1905, when the dragon became a symbol of the free Norway.

Decorative gables in the shape of dragons that are reminiscent of those on the stave churches were first used in modern Norway in 1871, when the Norwegian violinist Ole Bornemann Bull (1810-1880) rebuilt his family's summer house, Valestrand, near Bergen. During that decade similar summer houses were built in both Norway and Sweden. In 1874 Lorentz Henrik Segelcke Dietrichson (1834-1917), a Norwegian professor of art history then working in Sweden, built his house, Solhem, in Stockholm in the stave church style, but with Renaissance revival interiors. In the same year Dietrichsons friend and associate Carl Curman built his own house, Storstugan in Lysekil, Sweden, in a similar manner, drawing up the plans himself. Several of the cross beams were carved with dragons' heads, and the drawing room [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED] was decorated like a Viking banqueting hall and hung with tapestries relating the saga of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, whom Richard Wagner made famous as Siegfried in his operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. The fir beams were simply oiled in the traditional Norwegian manner, while other framing members were colored blue, red, and olive green and the cods of dragons were painted in black and yellow. These interiors, bathed in the shimmering light reflected from the Lyse Fjord, created a magical effect that set the pattern for all future houses in this style in Sweden and Norway.

Dietrichson moved home to Oslo in 1875 and became the country's first professor of art history at the University of Oslo as well as the founder of the Kunstindustrimuseet in Oslo and many other institutions. His book about Norwegian wood carving, published in 1878, was a further stimulus to the development of the dragon style.(2) In the same year the Norwegian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris included dragons on the gables and became the model for the country's pavilions at the international expositions in Chicago in 1893 and Paris in 1900.

The stave church at Gol was moved in 1884 to the estate of King Oscar II (18291907) at Bygdoy in Oslo, part of which is now the Norske Folkemuseum. Interest in these churches increased with the publication a decade later of Dietrichson's scientific study of them.(3) A year later he and Holm Hansen Munthe (1848-1898), a young architect, published a substantial book about Norwegian wooden architecture in general.(4) It appeared in German and was dedicated to King Wilhelm II (1859-1941) of Prussia, who was a great admirer of old Norse architecture and toured the Norwegian coast every summer in his yacht. In 1893 Wilhelm commissioned Munthe to build a boathouse and lodging for his sailors in the dragon style. These were erected on the Jungfernsee in Potsdam, Germany, from whence he set sail every year on what he called his Viking trip to Norway.

From the mid-1880s until the end of the century Munthe succeeded in adapting the stave church style to larger buildings such as railway stations, restaurants, and hotels, many of which are still in use today. In 1890 and 1891 Munthe built three famous tourist attractions on the hills around Oslo with marvelous views of the Oslo fjord: the Saint Hanshaugen restaurant, the Holmenkollen Tourist Hotel, and the Frognerseteren restaurant [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The last two are still major attractions. When Wilhelm II visited Frognerseteren in 1891 he was so enchanted that he had Munthe provide plans for a hunting lodge and a stave church, which were built in East Prussia (now Poland) in 1893.