DOI Heft:
No. 57 (December 1897)
DOI Artikel:Hedberg, Tor: A modern Swedish landscape painter, Prince Eugen
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18390#0204
A Modern Swedish Landscape Painter
own aims and a sure command over his means of dreamily over the lakes and their islands. Like
expression. After spending two years in Paris, most modern painters he is a poet painter, but a
working eagerly and earnestly in the studios of poet painter of an original and strangely individual
(iervex and Bonnat, he devoted some years to caste. He seizes the moment most fraught with
studying by himself under the direction of the feeling—grasps it and intensifies it until it produces
well-known Swedish artist, Hugo Salmson. He almost a monumental effect. It is in his colour—
exhibited once or twice, but he did not appear always strong and deep, sometimes fierce—that he
fully equipped before the public until 1894. puts his effects of movement, of the shifting and
He made a decided success, and the position he changing of objects. The handling of colour is
then won has since been strengthened. He is impressionistic, but the landscape itself emerges in
now considered, both at home and abroad, as firm plastic shapes and clear-cut outlines which
one of the leaders of Swedish landscape painters. look as if they could never be changed. Thus,
The most characteristic trait of his art is that he while he renders the momentary feeling, he also
gives a sincere and intense expression to the inner gives the effect of permanency behind it—the
meaning of native landscape, the deep, underlying effect of eternal life, over which the life of the
connection between the country and its people, moment passes.
He touches something necessary for the life of Look, for example, at The Old Castle. It stands
our inner nature, for our manner of thought and alone, abandoned on the plain, lowering behind a
feeling, whether he pictures the loneliness of home ridge which seems to absorb it slowly, as if to bury
on the broad plains, or the deep seriousness of the it. Over this the sky arches itself in lonely grandeur,
pine forests, where the high stems stand out like and from the horizon the storm approaches slowly
pillars against the red evening sky, or the trans- and inevitably. And this moment of anguish
parent darkness of summer nights, which spreads becomes an accumulated expression of the fate of
generations which have
lived behind those mighty
and dignified walls. In the
painting The Cloud the
motive is as simple as
possible. On one side a
group of trees in rich,
luxuriant foliage, the beau-
tiful contour of which
is counterbalanced by a
hill on the other side.
Through the valley and up
the height curves a path.
Where the vanishing-line
of wood and hill meet
" The Cloud" grows up
large and white and plastic,
one of those summer clouds
which do not announce
rain or break the sunny
calm, but slowly traverse
the sky or stand stationary
on the horizon for hours.
I say, with intention,
" grows up," because it
gives the effect of belong-
ing to this landscape, the
shape of which it has
borrowed, completing its
character of calmness and
FHE CLOUD" FROM A PAINTING BY H.R.H. PRINCE EUGEN OF SWEDEN simplicity. On aCCOUnt of
164
own aims and a sure command over his means of dreamily over the lakes and their islands. Like
expression. After spending two years in Paris, most modern painters he is a poet painter, but a
working eagerly and earnestly in the studios of poet painter of an original and strangely individual
(iervex and Bonnat, he devoted some years to caste. He seizes the moment most fraught with
studying by himself under the direction of the feeling—grasps it and intensifies it until it produces
well-known Swedish artist, Hugo Salmson. He almost a monumental effect. It is in his colour—
exhibited once or twice, but he did not appear always strong and deep, sometimes fierce—that he
fully equipped before the public until 1894. puts his effects of movement, of the shifting and
He made a decided success, and the position he changing of objects. The handling of colour is
then won has since been strengthened. He is impressionistic, but the landscape itself emerges in
now considered, both at home and abroad, as firm plastic shapes and clear-cut outlines which
one of the leaders of Swedish landscape painters. look as if they could never be changed. Thus,
The most characteristic trait of his art is that he while he renders the momentary feeling, he also
gives a sincere and intense expression to the inner gives the effect of permanency behind it—the
meaning of native landscape, the deep, underlying effect of eternal life, over which the life of the
connection between the country and its people, moment passes.
He touches something necessary for the life of Look, for example, at The Old Castle. It stands
our inner nature, for our manner of thought and alone, abandoned on the plain, lowering behind a
feeling, whether he pictures the loneliness of home ridge which seems to absorb it slowly, as if to bury
on the broad plains, or the deep seriousness of the it. Over this the sky arches itself in lonely grandeur,
pine forests, where the high stems stand out like and from the horizon the storm approaches slowly
pillars against the red evening sky, or the trans- and inevitably. And this moment of anguish
parent darkness of summer nights, which spreads becomes an accumulated expression of the fate of
generations which have
lived behind those mighty
and dignified walls. In the
painting The Cloud the
motive is as simple as
possible. On one side a
group of trees in rich,
luxuriant foliage, the beau-
tiful contour of which
is counterbalanced by a
hill on the other side.
Through the valley and up
the height curves a path.
Where the vanishing-line
of wood and hill meet
" The Cloud" grows up
large and white and plastic,
one of those summer clouds
which do not announce
rain or break the sunny
calm, but slowly traverse
the sky or stand stationary
on the horizon for hours.
I say, with intention,
" grows up," because it
gives the effect of belong-
ing to this landscape, the
shape of which it has
borrowed, completing its
character of calmness and
FHE CLOUD" FROM A PAINTING BY H.R.H. PRINCE EUGEN OF SWEDEN simplicity. On aCCOUnt of
164