Winter isn't all bad – these "sublime" landscapes of the frozen North from the turn of the 20th Century offer us a way into resilience – and an "acceptance of the seasonality of life".

With its bare trees, long nights and icy temperatures, it's perhaps unsurprising that, culturally in the Northern Hemisphere, we seem so conditioned to complain about winter. Yet, as the author Katherine May points out in her 2020 book Wintering, winter is also a valuable time for rest and retreat. "Winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit," she writes. Its "starkness", she argues, re-sensitises us, and "can reveal colours that we would otherwise miss".

For Nordic countries, where, in some regions, the season can last more than six months, making peace with winter is a necessity, with concepts such as the Norwegian friluftsliv (embracing the natural world) and the Danish hygge (hunkering down with simple comforts) offering fresh perspectives on cold weather.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the frozen North – with its vast fjords, mystical boreal forests and radiant light – became a powerful muse for artists such as Hilma af Klint, Edvard Munch and Harald Sohlberg. These artists immersed themselves in these cold climates, and developed a specifically Nordic style of painting imbued with their emotional responses to the landscape. Around 70 of these intensely atmospheric, expressionist works by artists from Scandinavia, Finland and Canada are being showcased in a new exhibition, Northern Lights, a cross-Atlantic collaboration that debuts at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, before travelling to New York's Buffalo AKG Art Museum in August.

It was natural that these painters should be drawn to these wintery scenes, Ulf Küster, the exhibition's curator, tells the BBC. "In Nordic landscapes, snow is a very dominant factor of life from October to late April… It's just this massive presence of white and nature and wilderness and vastness that really defines this landscape, and I think these painters have found a very interesting response to that." This burst of Nordic landscape painting was also a response to the changes that the painters perceived as a result of population growth and industrialisation. "There was a big desire in the late 19th Century to return to pure nature and the simple life," explains Küster. "You had these highly industrialised countries and pollution, and the pureness of white snow must have been quite a contrast."

Many of these northern regions were comparatively untouched by change, and featured vast, unpopulated vistas that were inherently painterly. Even today, Norway has a population of just 5.5 million, but a length of around 1,600km; while around three-quarters of Finland is still forested. To convey this scale, these paintings often adopt unconventional compositions where the view appears to stretch beyond the canvas. They are "boundless", says Küster. "They don't have borders". This is reinforced by the bird's-eye view adopted in works such as View from Pyynikki Ridge (1900) by the Finnish artist Helmi Biese. "It's as if the artists have used a drone," remarks Küster.

The height and scope of these unpopulated views also convey a sense of isolation and loneliness. Harald Sohlberg, whose luminescent 1914 version of Winter Night in the Mountains is........

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