To its detractors, nineteenth-century Sweden was little more than a provincial backwater. The country’s population numbered just a few million, there was no railway system and the network of roads left vast tracts of the countryside all but impenetrable. But one man’s wilderness was another man’s paradise, and with the rise of Romanticism came a new sense of national pride in the country’s expanses of untamed nature. The virgin forest, the unspoiled lake, the clear and freshening sky – these things were the God-given birthright of every Swede. Ramblers’ associations sprang up throughout the country. Painters were urged to put on their walking boots and record the majesty of the natural scene. The result was a sudden flowering of art, albeit one that remains little known outside Sweden itself. This is the subject of a small but engaging exhibition at the Barber Institute in Birmingham: “ ‘The History of Natural Beauty’: Swedish Landscape Painting 1850-1910.”

Sweden’s landscape painters did not want for encouragement. To paint the wilds of the country was nothing less than a patriotic duty, because it was to preserve, forever, the world of ancient Scandinavia – home to the heroes of the great old tales and sagas. In 1853, Crown Prince Charles – later King Charles XV – declared that “We have a wonderful country, perhaps not radiant in sunshine but all the more in seriousness and vigour... And so the history of natural beauty of this, the land of our fathers, shall be the main subject of our art – together they build a temple, and thus shall the work of our artists be also the worship of our Lord of nature, the Almighty God.” The future king was speaking in his capacity as Chancellor of the Stockholm Academy of Art. The message to Sweden’s painters could hardly have been more rousing. May the fjords be with you.

 

Eight years later, Marcus Larson travelled to Norway – then under Swedish rule – and painted a nocturne entitled Norwegian Fjord in Moonlight: Motif from the Sogne-Fjord. It is the picture with which the Barber’s exhibition begins. Longboats loom in the foreground, where moonlight twinkles on the lightly ruffled surface of the water. The staffage of oarsmen is unconvincingly lumpen, but the painter’s treatment of light is extraordinary. He has hidden a lightbulb moon behind a great crag of rock, creating an effect of such luminescence that the whole picture seems spectrally backlit. A bright shaft of light splits the fjord in two. Clouds like cotton fill the sky with their brightness. The result is a picture that somewhat resembles the nocturnes of other, earlier Romantic painters –Turner in England, Friedrich in Germany, Johann-Christian Dahl in Sweden itself – yet creates a quite different and unexpected range of effects. It is as if the conventions of art have suddenly been refreshed and reinvigorated through an immediate and direct response to nature. The picture is original because the artist has tried to bend the language of painting to what he actually saw, rather than the other way round.

All of the works in the exhibition are drawn from the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, which has an unparalleled collection of nineteenth-century Swedish landscape painting. They appear to have been chosen to illustrate the successive phases that marked the development of the genre. If Larson is a quintessential late Romantic, Gustav Rydberg’s Spring in Skane is the cold counterblast of Swedish Realism: a snapshot-like view of a horse and cart travelling along a rutted track on a grey day when the snow has begun to melt. Elsewhere, Swedish landscape painting turns out to be decidedly Franco-Swedish. Carl Fredric Hill’s The Beach at Luc is a bleak and heavily palette-knifed view of sea, sand and sky that pays homage to the art of Courbet, while Axel Lindman’s Apple Tree in Flower: Motif from Barbizon pays tribute to the Barbizon school of French landscape painters, with whom he studied.

Numerous Swedish painters chose to pursue their studies abroad – regardless of the advice of King Charles XV – and it is hard to escape the impression that much of their work is slavishly imitative of leading trends in European art. Edvard Bergh’s Summer Landscape, in which sunlit cows meander along a path beside a river, is a radiant essay in multi-faceted pastiche. The cows recall the work of Aelbert Cuyp, one of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age, while the composition and the light might have been borrowed from Constable and the prominent silver birch at the centre of the scene looks lifted from the later work of Corot.



The most interesting pictures in the show, like Larson’s nocturne, have a spark of originality born of actual lookingand real lived experience. Bruno Liljefors’s Jays is an arrestingly hyperreal study of worm-eaten, mildewed leaves and of nature red in tooth and claw. Olaf Arborelius’s panoramic Lake View at Engelsberg, is a piercingly atmospheric evocation of the wide open spaces of Vastmanland, Sweden’s lake district, some sixty miles northwest of Stockholm. Eugene Jansson’s Riddarfjarden, Stockholm, of 1898, was clearly inspired by Van Gogh and Gauguin – there had been an important exhibition of their work in Copenhagen five years earlier – but transcends the anxiety of mere influence. Lights dance in the dark water, the city dissolves into the ghostly reflections of a thousand streetlights, and the mauve sky pulses with the mysterious energies of night.

The show closes with an even more surprising painting, done in 1906 by Prins Eugen, youngest son of King Oscar II of Sweden (and cousin to Charles XV). Looking across from the royal residence, he painted The Factory: View from Waldemarsudde towards the Old Saltsjokvarn. Painted in the vivid broken brushtrokes of what might be termed Swedish Post-Impressionism, the young prince sees a steam tug and an expanse of blue-black water. Beyond that, he sees the yellow and red fires and the belching smoke of a chimney. It is a remarkable picture for a member of the Swedish royal family – any royal family – to have painted. It is a work of art of genuine integrity and power, a picture about the distance between here and there, a reflection on the spaces between people as well as things – a palpable, compassionate expression of curiosity about how others have to live.