Frits Thaulow (1847–1906) was born Johan Fredrik Thaulow on 20 October 1847 in Christiania (now Oslo), the son of a wealthy pharmacist. His maternal grandfather was the painter Jacob Munch. He studied art in Denmark and Germany and, in 1872, at the age of twenty-five, showed two marine paintings at the Kunstforeningen in Christiania. In 1874 he married Ingeborg Gad, whose sister was married to Paul Gauguin.
In 1879 he travelled in a small boat with his friend Christian Krohg to Skagen, in the far north of Denmark, and returned to Norway in 1880. He became a leading landscape painter of Norwegian naturalism, and later a celebrated painter of rivers, factories and winter scenes in Norway and France. From the early 1890s he lived mostly in France, especially in Normandy and in Brittany, and views of Dieppe and the River Arques are among his best-known late works.
He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour and received honours from Italy and Tunisia. Thaulow died on 5 November 1906 in Volendam in the Netherlands, and is buried in the Church of Our Saviour’s cemetery in Oslo.