Northern light presents a selection of Scandinavian and Dutch drawings from the Musée d'Orsay’s collections, highlighting Northern Europe’s artistic wealth. Symbolist landscapes and domestic scenes reveal the diversity of Northern European art in the 19th century.

This wall display underscores the Museum’s interest in enlarging its collection of works by foreign artists. Recent acquisitions of works by Swedish and Dutch artists hang side by side with items that, in some cases, have been in national collections for over a century.

Symbolist Nordic landscapes, long absent from the Museum’s collections of drawings, counterbalance Carl Larsson’s and Peder Severin’s peaceful domestic scenes, and artists such as Carl Forsberg and Philippe Smit, who were largely unknown in their lifetimes, find their rightful place alongside these great names.