which actually took on the character of schools in the various
parts of the country. The names of the artists have been
forever blotted out by time; but their works have to some
extent been preserved in the form of antependia, crucifixes,
and painted decorations from our oldest churches.

This art life, however, declined with the decline of our
national independence, and received its quietus upon the
coming of the Reformation. Even after that time, it is true,
artists of Norwegian nationality are to be found, and also
pictures of an ancient date which may be said probably or
certainly to have been done in Norway. Yet these sporadic,
for the most part ecclesiastical, pictures or portraits from
the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century possess so
little originality that it is difficult on the basis of these relics
to form the vaguest conception of an independent Norwe-
gian school of painting or of a consecutive pictorial tradition
in our country.

Nevertheless, such absence of a national art in the higher
sense is by no means to be understood as an evidence of lack
of artistic impulses among the people. On the contrary.
The artistic tendencies which among other nations since the
days of the Renaissance have been directed steadily toward
greater individual expression took a peculiarly general form
under the special cultural conditions surrounding the rural
Norwegian people in the time of the Danish sovereignty.
These tendencies gave rise to a decorative art, which ac-
quired a sharply distinctive character in the various provin-
cial communities and, hedged about by vigorous tradition,
gradually spread farther abroad.

There are, however, from the period preceding the nine-
teenth century, a small number of artists of Norwegian birth
whose names and dates are known, as well as their works.
Among these Magnus Berg, a man of peasant origin who
died in 1739, stands preëminent for talents as a painter and
carver that made him illustrious to fame in his own day.
He was a highly developed technician, numbered as a worker
in ivory among the best in the baroque age. All of his activi-
ties, however, fall outside of his native land, since he lived

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