Frogner Park

Frogner Park in Oslo's West End is a 45-hectare city park with an old manor, a rose garden and sports grounds, but people come for one thing it contains: the Vigeland installation, 212 sculptures in bronze and granite made by Gustav Vigeland between 1924 and 1943 and set out along a single axis. It is often described as the largest sculpture park made by one artist anywhere, and with between one and two million visitors a year it is Norway's most visited attraction. The figures are all nude and all human: children, lovers, the old, families, people fighting, embracing and falling asleep.

The axis runs from the main gates across a bridge 100 metres long, lined with 58 bronze figures; the best known is Sinnataggen, the Angry Boy, a small furious child caught mid-tantrum. Beyond it lies the fountain, originally conceived for the Norwegian parliament building, ringed by a frieze of 60 bronze reliefs and set in a black-and-white granite mosaic of about 1,800 square metres. Then come terraced steps with granite groups and, at the top, the Monolith.

The Monolith is the climax: a column 14.12 metres high carved out of a single block of stone into 121 human bodies climbing, clinging and sliding over one another towards the top. Three stonemasons worked on it for fourteen years, from 1929 to 1943. Around it stand granite groups arranged in rings, and past them the Wheel of Life, a circle of four adults, a child and a baby linked into an endless loop, carved in 1933–34. The effect of the whole sequence is of one long argument about the human life cycle, told without a single inscription.

The rest of the park is worth time too. Frogner Manor, the old estate house, has held the Oslo City Museum since 1909; the rose garden has some 14,000 roses of 150 kinds; and among roughly 3,000 trees some are more than 250 years old. The Vigeland Museum, devoted to the sculptor, stands nearby.

Getting there

The park lies about 3 km from central Oslo. Oslo-Gardermoen International Airport (OSL) is about 37 km away. The Frogner tram line and bus route 20 stop by the park, and the Majorstuen and Borgen metro stations are within walking distance.