Gabriel Kielland was a Norwegian painter, architect and designer.

Gabriel Kielland was born in Trondheim

Trondheim

Trondheim , historically, Nidaros and Trondhjem, is a city and municipality in Sør-Trøndelag county, Norway. With a population of 173,486, it is the third most populous municipality and city in the country, although the fourth largest metropolitan area. It is the administrative centre of...

, Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

. Kielland is one of the many notable alumni of the Trondheim Katedralskole

Trondheim Katedralskole

Trondheim katedralskole is an upper secondary school located next to the Nidaros Cathedral in the center of Trondheim, Norway....

. Kielland later studied to become an architect in Hanover

Hanover

Hanover or Hannover, on the river Leine, is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony , Germany and was once by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain, under their title as the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg...

 and then went to Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

 in 1892 to study painting. He was a pupil in Weimar

Weimar

Weimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. It is located in the federal state of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...

 during 1894 and later studied with Alfred Philippe Roll

Alfred Philippe Roll

Alfred Philippe Roll was a French painter.- Career :Roll studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he was taught by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri-Joseph Harpignies, Charles-François Daubigny and Léon Bonnat. He painted his first landscape in 1869, and in 1870 exhibited "Environs of Baccarat" and "Evening"...

 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

.

From 1896 he worked for a time as an architect in Trondheim, in a rigorous and constructive art nouveau

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...

 style, but also painted landscapes, portraits and several altarpieces. As an architect he designed, among other things, Trondheim electricity primary station at Øvre Leirfoss, Finnes orphanage and Dr. Cureas clinic in Trondheim. He later became a teacher of freehand drawing at Norwegian Institute of Technology

Norwegian Institute of Technology

The Norwegian Institute of Technology, known by its Norwegian abbrevation NTH was a science institute in Trondheim, Norway. It was established in 1910, and existed as an independent technical university for 85 years, after which it was merged into the University of Trondheim as an independent...

 in Trondheim 1899-1902.

Kielland is best known as the creator of the Rose Window (Rosevinduet i Nidarosdomen) in the Nidaros Cathedral

Nidaros Cathedral

Nidaros Cathedral is a Church of Norway cathedral located in the city of Trondheim in Sør-Trøndelag county, Norway. It was the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Nidaros from its establishment in 1152 until its abolition in 1537. Since the Reformation, it has been the cathedral of the...

 in Trondheim. In 1908 he won the competition for the stained glass windows for the reconstruction of the Nidaros Cathedral’s southern gable. In addition, Kielland delivered proposals to all of the church windows and received the commission to create the stained glass windows. The paintings are iconographic imagery which were produced in collaboration with Oluf Kolsrud (1885–1945), professor of church history.

The Rose Window motif faces west into the sunset and symbolizes doomsday. The rose window’s structural layout followed the design by cathedral architect Olaf Nordhagen

Olaf Nordhagen

Johan Olaf Brochmann Nordhagen was a Norwegian architect, engineer and artist.He was born in Christiania as a son of artist Johan Nordhagen and Christine Magdalene Brochmann Johansen . He was a brother of Rolf Nordhagen and through him an uncle of Per Jonas Nordhagen...

, and the diameter is built up around an eightfold symmetry with the innermost parts proportioned such that the diameter is formed of 16 sheets. The painted glass in the window consists of over 10,000 pieces. The Rose Window was presented as a gift from the women of Norway for the anniversary of the death of St. Olav in 1930 and is regarded as Kielland's masterpiece.

External links

• Some famous former students at Trondheim Katedralskole
• Eyewitness Travel Guides: Norway. 2003. p. 193.
• Family genealogy