Vigeland Sculpture Park

Frogner Park in Oslo is the city's largest green space, an old manor estate that the municipality bought in 1896 and opened to the public in stages from 1904. Its centre belongs to one man. From the 1920s until his death in 1943 Gustav Vigeland filled it with 212 sculptures in bronze and granite, all of his own design, laid out along a single axis. The Norwegians call the ensemble Vigelandsanlegget, the Vigeland installation; visitors call it Vigeland Park. It is often described as the largest sculpture park made by a single artist, and it is Norway's most visited attraction.

The route runs east to west. A granite and wrought-iron Main Gate, erected in 1942, leads onto the Bridge, 100 metres long and lined with 58 bronzes of people of every age — the stamping, furious toddler known as Sinnataggen, the Angry Boy, is the one everybody photographs. The Bridge was the first part opened, in 1940. Beyond it a group of eight small bronzes shows children at play, and then comes the Fountain, first designed to stand in front of the Storting, with sixty bronze reliefs and an 1,800-square-metre mosaic of black and white granite around it.

The axis climbs to the Monolith Plateau, where 36 granite groups circle the steps behind eight wrought-iron gates, and at the summit stands the Monolith itself. Vigeland modelled it in clay in 1924; a granite block weighing several hundred tons arrived from a quarry near Halden in 1927, and from 1929 three masons spent fourteen years transferring his model into the stone. When the shed around it was opened at Christmas 1944, 180,000 people queued to see it. The column is 14.12 metres high and carved from a single piece — 121 bodies twisting upwards towards the sky. Past a sundial of 1930 the axis ends at the Wheel of Life, a ring of adults and children carved in 1933–34. Few pieces in the park are as quietly affecting as Surprised, a young woman modelled in 1942 by Ruth Maier, an Austrian refugee deported and murdered at Auschwitz months later; the bronze was cast in 2002. In 2009 the park and installation became the first park in Norway protected under the Heritage Act.

Getting there

Frogner Park is about 3 km west of central Oslo. The Frogner tram line and bus 20 stop along Kirkeveien on the park's east side, including a stop named Vigelandsparken, and Majorstuen and Borgen metro stations are nearby. The park is open at all times. Oslo Gardermoen Airport (OSL) is about 37 km away.