Oluf Høst Museum

The Oluf Høst Museum opened in 1998 and is housed in Hedvig and Oluf Høst’s beautiful villa, Norresân, in Gudhjem.

The original artist’s home has a unique location, between the cliffs and the horizon – right in the middle of Oluf Høst’s world of motifs.

The museum owns a rich collection of Oluf Høst’s paintings, which are exhibited exactly where they were originally created. We also present two or three special exhibitions each year. Inside the villa you find the museum shop. In the basement, the museum’s cinema shows a film about Høst’s life and art at regular intervals. Here you will also find toilets, wardrobe and lift.

The museum’s beautiful rock garden is also worth a visit.The garden slopes steeply up towards Gudhjem’s hill, the rock formation ”Bokul”. Part of the garden is an old quarry, which in its time supplied granite for the construction of the emergency harbour on the other side of Hedvig and Oluf Høst’s house. Fig and mulberry trees grow in the garden. In the garden you will also find Oluf Høst’s summer studio and the studio that Oluf Høst eventually gave to his son, Ole Wiedemann Høst. Inside the villa is Oluf Høst’s winter studio.

During winter 2021-22 we have renovated the museum and the garden.

Who was Oluf Høst :

Oluf Høst (1884-1966) was the only local Bornholm artist in the so  called “The Bornholm Painters”, which transformed Danish landscape painting in the early 1900s. In 1933 Oluf Høst received the Eckersberg Medal, the highest award a Danish painter can receive.

Oluf Høst also exhibited internationally, including in New York (1927), at the Venice Biennale (1934) and at the World Exhibition in Brussels (1935). The outbreak of Second World War put an end to his international breakthrough.

Instead, he immersed himself in Bornholm motifs such as the local herring smokeries, the characteristic Bornholm round churches and the bonfires in front of the blue horizon, a Danish midsummer tradition called ”Sankt Hans”. Oluf Høst also painted his farm Bognemark more than 100 times over 30 years.

(Autumn Landscape, 1925)