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Northern Lights to Illuminate Spring
A superb collection of 19th-century landscape paintings from Sweden’s leading public art collection comes to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in the new year to form the first show of its type ever mounted by a British gallery.
Northern Lights: Swedish Landscapes from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, which runs from 27 February to 31 May 2009 at the University of Birmingham-based gallery, provides a rare opportunity to discover and enjoy the stunning achievements of 20 great Swedish painters ranging in date from about 1850 to 1910.
The period was a golden age of imagination, invention and sheer magic for landscape in Sweden and the styles and themes of these pictures vary enormously, ranging from dark Romantic forests to Symbolist evocations of midsummer nights.
The genre was increasingly becoming the Swedish national art-form during the late 19th century, prompted largely by the enormous impact of the vast and varied terrain of Sweden itself — a country three times as big as the United Kingdom with a fraction of its population.
The exhibition traces the development of Swedish landscape from the legacy of the Romantic age, with the dramatic wilderness paintings of artists such as Carl Johan Fahlcrantz and Marcus Larson, through those working at the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany and later in France. Some, including Alfred Wahlberg, became interested in painting en plein air and Realism and were influenced by artists such as Théodore Rousseau and Daubigny, while others worked alongside the Impressionist colony at Grez-sur-Loing in Normandy or, like the royal Prins Eugen, adapted their style to a Scandinavian subject matter.
But the nature of Swedish landscape painting was transformed over these decades from derivative and academic dependence on old master or foreign prototypes into a truly national art-form. Crucial to this development were the contributions of pioneering individuals, such as the originality and novel working methods of Carl Fredrik Hill and the almost transcendental urban visions of Eugène Jansson. Among the most technically mould-breaking of the artists represented is August Strindberg, more usually known in Britain as a dramatist and novelist.
The exhibition originally evolved from a loan request by the Nationalmuseum for the Barber’s iconic The Blue Bower, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for the Swedish museum’s exhibition The Pre-Raphaelites. Because of the importance of the loan, the Barber was given a free reign to choose works from the Nationalmuseum in return.
Barber Senior Curator Paul-Spencer Longhurst explained: ‘The Nationalmuseum holds the greatest collection of Swedish landscapes, and exhibiting a selection of them seemed the logical choice for the Barber in many ways.
‘Firstly, it is fascinating area of painting in Northern Europe that merits much more attention and study. And secondly, there’s the Dahl connection.’
In 2006, the Barber staged the groundbreaking exhibition Moonrise over Europe: JC Dahl and Romantic Landscape, focusing on the work of the Norwegian painter and his contemporaries, including Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, and featuring an array of gem-like, haunting moonlit landscapes from the first half of the nineteenth century.
‘Northern Lights is in effect a sequel to Moonrise,’ said Dr Spencer-Longhurst. ‘Norway and Sweden were joined politically between 1814 and 1905, and the major advances in art that took place in Scandinavia occurred in Sweden after around 1850, whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century they took place in Norway and Denmark.’
December 2008
This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and an extensive programme of events, including lectures, painting workshops and a concert.
Ends
| For further information, please contact Andrew Davies, Barber Press and Marketing Officer, on 0121 414 2946 or andrewdavies@barber.org.uk |