The ‘golden age’ of Nordic art
Terry Grimley visits Northern Lights, which showcases Swedish landscapes.
Until relatively recently the art of the Nordic countries went virtually unnoticed in Britain, preoccupied as we have been with the various golden ages of Italy, Flanders, Spain, Holland, France and the United States.
It was probably the greetings card industry which, having exhausted the public’s appetite for Impressionism and the Pre-Raphaelites, first began to make the painters of Nordic light circa 1900 more familiar to the general public.
Academics and museum curators have begun to catch on too, and the Barber Institute ventured into this territory in 2002 with the acquisition of a small gem by the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl, to which it has since added a painting by his English-sounding compatriot Thomas Fearnley. Both are still very rare artists to encounter in a British public collection.
Now the Barber is showing Northern Lights, an exhibition of 18 paintings and 11 works on paper from the collection of the National Museum, Stockholm. It is both a sequel to the 2006 exhibition Moonrise Over Europe, which the Barber built around the Dahl painting, and payback for the Barber’s loan of its Rossetti, The Blue Bower, to the National Museum for the first-ever exhibition of Pre-Raphaelites in Sweden.
The exhibition spans the second half of the 19th century. The earliest painting is A Waterfall, Alvkarleby by Carl Johan Fahlcrantz (1774-1861), which recalls Dahl in its extreme romanticism: a lonely cottage, smoke rising from its chimney, cowers under a black, stormy sky.
Opposite, Norwegian Fjord in Moonlight by Marcus Larson (1825-1864) is a defining image of Nordic romanticism with its towering cliffs offset against the brilliant gleam of light across the distant water. Looking for British parallels you might think of the moonlit landscapes of Joseph Wright of Derby, but this is much later (1861) and the fjord-scape is not quite like anything Wright painted. Norway, incidentally, was part of the kingdom of Sweden from 1814 to 1905.
But if these first two paintings establish something distinctively Scandinavian, this becomes more difficult to identify in the middle section of the exhibition.
In the early part of the 19th century Swedish artists looked to Rome for inspiration. Then Dusseldorf became an important focus, but in most of these paintings we find Swedish artists looking at their native landscape through the prism of new developments in French art.
Alfred Wahlberg (1834-1906) one of the last Swedes to study in Dusseldorf, was also the first to move to Paris, inspired by the example of the pioneering open-air paintings of the Barbizon School, which he saw in Brussels in 1860. He became a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon, and his View Near Vaxholm (1872) sees him working in a realist and near-Impressionist manner in a view through trees and across rooftops towards water where the colour is muted and nothing is allowed to rise above the mundane.
Two other paintings from the 1870s make a strong contrast. Carl Fredrik Hill’s The Beach at Luc is a ruthlessly minimalist view of sand, sea and sky painted with an almost expressionist impasto. On the other hand, Edvard Bergh’s Summer Landscape is a prettified riverside scene with peasant and cattle which suggests Corot on his best behaviour.
Though these are Swedish landscape artists the landscapes themselves are often French as the artists settled for long periods in the French countryside. Small paintings by Axel Lindman and Elias Erdtman suggest the various influences of the Barbizon painters, Corot and Jules Bastien-Lepage.
Karl Nordstrom (1855-1923) is the artist regarded as most successful in bringing the Impressionist style home to Sweden. His panoramic view of Stockholm from 1889 shows how comprehensively he had taken on its characteristic broken brushstroke.
But Gustav Fjaested (1868-1948) brings us back once more to something quintessentially Scandinavian with the simplified sculptural shapes of snowbound trees in an eerie blue light in Winter Moonlight, dated 1895.
Otto Hesselbom (1848-1913) also captures something distinctively Swedish in his Summer Night: Study – and quite deliberately so, as this is a study for a large panorama he called Our Country. However, its simplified style, derived from Post-Impressionism, might have found parallels in many countries at this time.
Other paintings which give a Scandinavian accent to a synthesis of turn-of the-century styles are The Factory: View from Waldermarsudde towards the Old Saltsjokvarn by Prince Eugen (1865-1947), who was the youngest son of King Oscar II but an important figure in Swedish art of this period on his own merits, and Riddarfjarden, Stockholm, by Eugen Jansson (1862-1915) an enthralling, near abstract nocturnal waterscape which bears the unmistakable influence of Edvard Much.
* Northern Lights: Swedish Landscapes from the National Museum, Stockholm, is at the Barber Institute, University of Birmingham, until May 31 (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm. Admission free).
