Background
Karl Diriks was born on January 9, 1855 in Oslo, Norway, into the family of Christian Ludvig Diriks and Benedicte Henriette Munch. He was a grandson of government minister Christian Adolph Diriks and a nephew of Carl Frederik Diriks.
Karl Diriks was born on January 9, 1855 in Oslo, Norway, into the family of Christian Ludvig Diriks and Benedicte Henriette Munch. He was a grandson of government minister Christian Adolph Diriks and a nephew of Carl Frederik Diriks.
Karlstudied at Aars and Voss school. When he was an architectural student in Karlsruhe in the winter of 1874 - 1875, he came into contact with Norwegian and German painters like Krohg, Thaulow and Klinger. He followed Krohg and Klinger to Berlin in the autumn of 1875, currently a student at the Bauacademie.
When Karl returned south in 1877, it was via Berlin to Weimar to become a painter. As an artist he tried in several genres. Among his youth workers there are German urban prospects and landscapes in oil and watercolor, many of them skilled. In Berlin, he designed several of his artist friends, and preserved draft Norwegian adventure illustrations suggests that he tried to embark on the work of illustrating Asbjørnsen's fairytale edition of 1879.
In the fall of 1879 he settled down in Christiania and became a faithful portraiture of his birthplace and its immediate vicinity for a long time. From a careful detail realism, he slowly worked towards a somewhat more liberal treatment, but still with great emphasis on the details and the sense of the picturesque motive. There are pictures like "Majorstuen" and "Fra Skovveien." These pictures testify to the architect's sense of the city's ancient settlement, as carefully done, and in pictures such as the "Josefinegate" and "Fra Piperviken" there is also a lively and characteristic figure magazine. Likewise, he often came to Åsgårdstrand and Fredriksvern, painted in the area around Arendal, on Jæren, and in 1886 he reached Finnmark and Murmansk. He claimed that he had visited all Norwegian cities.
On his first Paris trip in 1882 - 1883 he had become acquainted with impressionism, in particular, Monet's great exhibition in March 1883 had greatly impressed him. He painted a large street scene, "La Rue de Rome", with a lively presentation of the journey all the way to Monet's spirit, and with that he escaped into the Salon in 1883. Other pictures show the influence of Alfred Sisley. After returning in August 1883, the impressionist element of his art became less noticeable for some years, even though a picture like "Spring Sun" shows a greater sense of light and color than before. However, in the 1890's, he developed the wide loose brush stroke and the distinctive color scale that began his later French period.
After a stay in Bergen, in January 1895, went on a longer journey which, besides Paris, led Karl to Spain, Italy, Germany and Austria. In 1899 he settled in Paris after requesting French publisher Julien Leclercq. All that year he had his first exhibition there and, surprisingly, he soon had a position in French art. Also an exhibition in Antwerp in 1901 attracted considerable attention. He followed up his success with great energy, one solo exhibition redeemed the other in France, Germany, Denmark and Norway, and he regularly exhibited at the Parisian Salons: Salon des Indépendants, Salon des Beaux Arts, Salon d'Automne. Their home became a meeting place also for many foreign artists, including Picasso and Modigliani. His position was confirmed not least through the acquisition of the French state.
During the war years, Karl was mostly in Paris, but painted in 1917 in Cancale, Normandy and in 1918 in Collioure, near the Spanish Mediterranean coast. In 1921 he was in Norway for the first time in nine years and settled in Drøbak in 1922. His last longer stay at home before the war during January 1909 and November 1910 had highlighted his interest in Norwegian motifs, and he gathered more and more about the depiction of the Nordic winter weather with snowy and windy winds, steamship smoke like floats in the stormboxes and boats bouncing in the lake. But the freshness gradually disappeared, and his post-war images awere generally weak. He repeated himself, and with his rapid painting he was enticed to overproduction. The artist died on March 17, 1930 in Horten, Norway.
In 1930 Karl married Anna Diriks in Stockholm.
