August Eiebakke ^{1 2 3}

   Another name for August was August Karlsen.

  General Notes:

August went to live in Kristiania (now Oslo) when he was 15. He wanted to train as a sculptor and enrolled at the Royal School of Drawing in Kristiania in 1883. He studied there until 1889 under Julius Middelthun, Mathias Skeibrok (1851–96) and Harald Petersen (1850–1933). August grew more interested in painting and from 1886 to 1887 took instruction from the leading Norwegian Naturalist painters Christian Krohg, Hans Heyerdahl and Eilif Peterssen. He made his début at the Kristiania Autumn Exhibition in 1887 with a landscape and an interior. He exhibited regularly at this exhibition and won special praise for Laying the Table (Oslo, N.G.) in 1891. During this period August concentrated on realistic depictions of human subjects and landscape.

In 1892 he spent several months at Kristian Zahrtmann’s school of painting in Copenhagen and for a time his work showed the influence of his teacher. In 1893 he went to Paris and the following year made the first of many visits to Italy. Here he approached a more stylized, Neo-Romantic form resembling the style that Danish colleagues such as Peter Rostrup Bøiesen (b 1882), Karl Schou (1870–1938) and Vilhelm Tetens (1871–1956) were using. For a time he also worked on religious themes, for example Jesus and Thomas (Oslo, Frogner Church). August won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.

  Noted events in his life were:

• He was employed. painter [kunstmaler] and head-master with Statens kunst- og industriskole 1912-37.