EX LIBRIS

Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration

GIVEN BY

WSS SU5AAI 0. BUSS

IN

MARCH 1330

This series of Scandinavian Monographs is published by the American-Scandinavian Foundation to promote the study of Scandinavian history and culture, in the belief that true knowledge of the North will contrib- ute to the common profit on both sides of the Atlantic

SCANDINAVIAN MONOGRAPHS VOLUME V

SCANDINAVIAN ART

THIS VOLUME IS ENDOWED

BY MR. C. HENRY SMITH

OF SAN FRANCISCO

Midsummer Night at Riddarholmen, by Eugen Jansson Owned by Thorsten Laurin, Stockholm

Scandinavian Art

ILLUSTRATED

CARL LAURIN

EMIL HANNOVER

JENS THUS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRISTIAN BRINTON

NEW YORK

THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION

C. S. PETERSON, THE REGAN PRINTING HOUSE, CHICAGO, U. S. A.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

For this, the first comprehensive treatment of Scandinavian art in any language, the American-Scandinavian Foundation is fundamentally indebted to Mr. C. Henry Smith, of San Francisco, whose munificent gift provided for the completed manuscripts and the engravings. The volume has been the labor of several years on the part of the eminent authors, the translators, and editors. The survey of Swedish art has been written by Carl G. Laurin, author of Konsthistoria, Sweden Through the Artist's Eye, etc. The account of Danish art in the nineteenth century is by Emil Hannover, Director of the Danish Museum of Industrial Art. The development of modern Norwegian art has been traced by Jens Thiis, Director of the National Gal- lery in Christiania. The appearance of the work has been some- what delayed because of the illness of Mr. Thiis, who was prevented from revising the last part of his manuscript. One of the trans- lators, Mr. Frederic Schenck, of Harvard University, who rendered the Danish section into English, did not live to see his work in press. The Swedish section has been translated by Adolph Burnett Ben- son, assistant professor of Scandinavian at Yale University, and the Norwegian manuscript by Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, assistant pro- fessor of English at the University of California, Southern Branch. The Swedish plates have been engraved by P. A. Norstedt och Soner of Stockholm, the Danish and Norwegian plates by the Photochrome Engraving Company of New York. The task of collating the manu- scripts, editing the translations, and placing the illustrations, as well as proof-reading, has been executed by Hanna Astrup Larsen, editor of the American-Scandinavian Review. Throughout the prepara- tion of the book the Committee on Publications consulted Dr. Chris- tian Brinton, the well known art critic, who will be remembered in this connection especially for his various essays on Scandinavian art and for his catalogue of the Scandinavian Exhibition of 1912-1913.

The Committee on Publications.

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CONTENTS

Introduction 1 1

A Survey of Swedish Art

I. The Ecclesiastical Period 37

II. The Castles of the Vasas. After the Thirty Years'

War 58

III. The Carolinian Age. The Royal Palace 73

IV. French and English Influences in the Gustavian Age 87 V. Sergei 106

VI. The Transition Period 114

VII. The Diisseldorf Influence. The Historical Painters 128 VIII. The Opponents. New Tendencies in Swedish

Painting 151

IX. New Tendencies in Swedish Painting (Continued) 185

X. Modern Plastic and Decorative Art 207

XL Architecture at the Opening of the Twentieth Cen- tury 223

Danish Art in the Nineteenth Century

I. The Period Before Eckersberg 241

II. Eckersberg 247

III. Eckersberg's School 255

IV. Marstrand 270

V. The Europeans 280

VI. The Nationalists 293

VII. The Coloristic Awakening 315

VIII. The Quest of Style and Recent Tendencies 359

IX. Sculpture 393

X. Architecture 420

Modern Norwegian Art

I. The Nineteenth Century Pioneers, Dahl and

Fearnley 437

II. Tidemand and Gude. Diisseldorf Technique and

Norwegian Subjects 454

III. The Munich School 484

IV. The Beginning of French Influence 497

V. The Naturalists : Thaulow, Krohg, and Weren-

skiold. Gerhard Munthe 507

VI. Other Painters of the Seventies and Eighties.... 542

VII. The Intermediate Generation 560

VIII. Munch 580

IX. The Present Generation of Painters 592

X. Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century 613

INTRODUCTION

BY

CHRISTIAN BRINTON, M.A., Litt. D.

INTRODUCTION

By Christian Brinton

WHILE it may appear extraneous to apply to aes-jf thetic considerations the rigid determinism exempli- fied by Hippolyte Taine, yet it is obvious that a knowledge of the land and its people is essential to a proper understanding of the art of a given country. You cannot ap- preciate the significance of the Italian Primitives unless you know something of the serene beauty of the Tuscan or Um- brian hillside as seen in the conventionalized backgrounds of the early masters. And similarly you will fail to grasp the spirit of Northern painting if you are not in some degree fa- miliar with the conformation of the country and the composi- tion of the light that slants obliquely upon shimmering fjord or sparse upland pasture. There can be no question concern- ing the fundamental differences between the art of the North and the art of the South. The one is septentrional, the other meridional, with all the distinction implies, and it should be apparent to any observant person that these } divergences are in large part due to circumstances of race, ' clime, and climate.

Granted a specific ethnic heritage and a special natural environment, it is interesting to note how certain nations react to their surroundings. The art of the Italians, follow- ing that of the Greeks, is formal and balanced. It reveals a regard for proportion, a genius for co-ordination, not seen elsewhere in the pageant of pictorial expression. Italian painting is not primarily a record of external observation, of nature found ready at hand. Its spirit is philosophic. It

11

12 SCANDINAVIAN ART

is deeply imbued with thought and reason. Little windows scrupulously spaced look out upon vistas where everything is held in equilibrium, upon a miniature universe subjected to an inner sense of symmetry. There is in Italian painting, from the fresh-tinted frescoes of Giotto to the flowing har- monies of Tiepolo, no marked departure from this essential principle. And while color plays an important role in these compositions, notably in the work of the Venetians, it rarely attains ascendency over line and form.

That which, without risk of misapprehension, may be termed the scholastic element in Italian art assumes, with the work of the Frenchmen, a more scientific application. .The chief contribution made by latter-day France to the art of painting has been the development of the theory and prac- tice of what is known as impressionism. While there have been reactions against impressionism, they have proved noth- ing more than tributes to a method without which modern art could scarcely have come into existence. The entire pan- orama of contemporary landscape painting bases itself upon impressionism. We no longer, as with the Italians, gaze through narrow little panels upon a remote, ordered world. We are at last out of doors flooded with sunshine. We were brought there by means of the patient analysis of light and the application of certain definite scientific principles to the problem of atmospheric painting.

If the art of the Italians is philosophic, and that of the Frenchmen, especially Manet, Monet, and their successors, illumined by scientific clairvoyance, it is but reasonable to infer that the work of the Scandinavians should betray characteristics equally distinctive. The inhabitants of the Northern peninsula, cut off from the main current of Con- tinental cultural development, and living in close community with nature, have evolved an aesthetic expression that may be termed indigenous. In painting, sculpture, and archi- tecture similar conditions have produced similar results. While it is manifest that the art of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway is by no means identical, it nevertheless shares cer- tain specific affiliations. The differences are those of degree,

INTRODUCTION 13

not of kind. This art is an expression that foreigners in- stantly recognize as septentrional.

Scholastic with the Italian, scientific with the Frenchman, aesthetic utterance with the Scandinavians displays a lyric quality such as one encounters in the art of no other country. In its finer essence the pictorial production of the Northern peoples is lyrical. These paintings are songs in color, these artists poets in line and tone. That this should be the case there need be scant wonder, for here again have certain causes produced their appointed results. / Determinism in matters artistic is in fact as firmly established as is determin- ism in the field of physiology or psychology^

The farther one journeys from Greece and Rome, the less is one enslaved by the fetish of form, by that academic tyranny which is the enemy of individual expression. The relative remoteness of the Scandinavian artist from such sources of enervation has proved his salvation. j_ Living alone or in more or less isolated surroundings, there has sprung up between the Northern painter and his environ- ment a kind of pregnant intimacy. He has been compelled to seek inspiration in his feelings and fancies, his reactions to nature and natural scene. And the particular character of the scenes with which he is most familiar constitutes not the least of those silent yet eloquent forces that have condi- tioned his aesthetic consciousness. Serenity and precision may flourish in the South, among the luminous isles of the .^gean or along the shores of the Mediterranean, but the North is the home of mystery, of poetic suggestion, and that psychic restlessness which you encounter alike on the can- vases of Edvard Munch or in the pages of August Strindberg. The exalted, at times frenzied, struggle for freedom which confronts you in the work of these men amounts indeed to a phase of eleutheromania.

The first thing that impresses the student of Scandinavian art is the infrequency with which one meets representations of the human figure. Man is here not the center of interest as is the case with the Greeks and Latins. It is nature and natural phenomena that hold the place of honor. The art

14 SCANDINAVIAN ART

of the North is a chaste art. It betrays an impersonality, a cosmic anonymity far removed from the petty or trivial. Deriving its stimulus from direct contact with the out of doors, it dedicates its energies to a species of pantheistic nature worship. The deity which presides over Northern art is not fashioned in the image of humanity. It is com- pounded of that elemental rhythm which models the surface of the earth, tints the far reaches of the sky, ruffles the waves, and stirs the foliage of birch or pine.

That the language of this art may possess general appeal, that it may attain that universality of application with which the nations of the South have endowed their concep- tion of the human form has been the aim, conscious or uncon- scious, of the Northern artist. In the following pages you will be enabled to judge how far this result has been achieved. Whatever the verdict, there is one fact that stands plainly forth, namely, the fact that the Scandinavian artist, once he finds himself, seldom lacks the tenacity to be national in theme and treatment. "Forward and home," was the inspiring slogan of that courageous coterie which in the middle eighties of the last century forsook Munich and Paris to return to the Northland, and happily, "forward and home" has since been their watchword.

The picture of Scandinavian art you will gather from the ensuing pages is a threefold presentment. You have here- with unveiled before you the artistic features of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Each section has been traced by a practised hand. While the touch varies a trifle, the result will not fail to fuse itself into a composite portrait of the aesthetic physiognomy of the Scandinavian people. It is but natural that the art of painting should receive major con- sideration. Aside from certain monuments of historical inter- est, architecture is comparatively new in the North, and sculp- ture is not as yet widely cultivated. The art of Scandinavia is coloristic. While it took these fresh-visioned Northern- ers some time to outgrow the sombre tonality of museum and gallery, they eventually recaptured their rightful heritage of clear, tonic color and high-keyed harmony. It was indeed

INTRODUCTION 15

not for naught that they enjoyed in France the distinction of being known as la belle ecole blonde.

The story of Swedish art as outlined by Mr. Carl G. Laurin forms a full-length portrait. The background is amply filled in, and none of the important accents is missing. Protected by the Court and patronized by the nobility, the artistic taste of Sweden was from the beginning eclectic. Brilliant, responsive, and full of rapidly assimilated impres- sions from the outside world, Swedish painting of the eighteenth century is replete with the artificial grace of the reign of rococo. Names such as Gustav Lundberg, Alex- ander Roslin, Nils Lafrensen the younger, and Peter Adolf Hall were less known in Stockholm than in Paris, where they contributed their quota to the delicate yet imperishable bloom of a deathless age. While there was sounder stuff in their predecessor, the Hamburg-born David Ehrenstrahl, they typify the auspicious inception of an art that has always appealed to the aristocratic classes, and which has been prac- tised with distinction by more than one representative of the royal family.

The baroque pomposity of Ehrenstrahl and the rococo radiance of Lundberg and his associates were succeeded by the pseudo-classicism which dates from the French Revolu- tion, and by the extravagant though sincere nature worship of which Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the fervid apostle. Wertmuller's Danae, in the National Museum, and the poetic landscapes of Elias Martin, revealing manifest traces of the influence of Gainsborough and the English elegiac school, are indicative of the tendencies of the period. The English affiliation established by Martin was strengthened by Karl Fredrik von Breda, who studied with Reynolds. Breda returned to Stockholm with a richer tonality, a more expressive line, and an emotional warmth that foreshadow the dawn of romanticism. His likenesses of the prominent personages of the day furthermore possess a sense of style and a talent for character delineation that entitle them to high rank in the category of Peninsular portraiture.

Strange as it may seem, the one outstanding figure in the

16 SCANDINAVIAN ART

eighteenth and early nineteenth century art of Sweden was not a painter, but the sculptor Johan Tobias Sergei. Swedish painting has in fact not yet produced its Sergei. The model- ler of the Faun, in the National Museum, was a man of ex- traordinary endowment and rare force of character. Too robust a soul to succumb to the emasculated classicism of the day, he worked out his artistic destiny in typically independ- ent fashion. Older than Canova or Thorvaldsen, he never- theless remained younger in spirit, in vision, and in his veracious rendering of form during a period when plastic expression was notably deficient in vigor and sincerity.

Midway between the older and newer schools lingers the refined, mobile silhouette of Egron Lundgren, the Swedish Constantin Guys, who like Guys, was attracted by English life, social and military, and who did some of his best work while in the British capital. Lundgren was a cosmopolitan product. With his responsive line and delicate eye for color, he was a posthumous child of the age of rococo. When the rest of the world was turning to historical subject, drab peas- ant theme, or landscape darkened by heavy shadows from the venerable Fontainebleau oaks, Lundgren's vision remained vivacious and contemporary. He possessed the true aristocratic instinct for style, and nothing in Swedish art compares in grace and sensitive charm with these spirited water-color sketches.

While Egron Lundgren was transcribing with sparkling verity the pageant of mid-century life in London or Luck- now, in Paris or Madrid, the balance of Sweden was, as has been intimated, engaged in the sober task of creating a national school of art. The vogue of frigid neo-classicist and false romanticist was succeeded by the genuine outdoor sentiment of such pioneer landscape painters as Edvard Bergh and Alfred Wahlberg. The reposeful vision of the nature intimists was supplemented by the story-telling genre of August Jernberg and Ferdinand Fagerlin, and the earnest attempt to translate native myth and fable into paint was exemplified in the canvases of Blommer and Malmstrom. The most imposing talent of the day was, however, Johan

INTRODUCTION 17

Fredrik Hockert. Though imbued with the treacle tonality of the romanticists, Hockert managed to express himself with vigor and conviction. His large, effective canvas entitled The Palace Fire, 1697, is an epoch-making work in the history of Northern art.

The foregoing men constitute certain important high- lights in a general survey of Swedish painting. For its defin- ite sequence you have the discriminating exposition of Mr. Laurin, who follows its progress from its brilliant, sporadic beginnings to the substantial achievement of the contem- « porary school. Pit is only within the present generation that Swedish art halTcome into its ownj With the return from France, from Paris, and from Grez, of the intrepid band who resolutely opposed the Academy, and the formation, ini 1886, of the society known as the Konstnarsforbundet, Swedish art assumes its rightful position in the forward march of European taste. The influence of Diisseldorf, which had been superseded by that of Munich and Paris, gave place to a passionate love of native scene and char- acter, and a determination to become national alike in theme and treatment. With eyes for the first time open to the beauty of the homeland, and a technique fortified by famil- iarity with the message of latter-day naturalism and impres- sionism, the Swedish painter was not long in giving proof of his new-found power.

In the vanguard of the modern movement looms Ernst Josephson, equipped with a masterly breadth of draughts- manship and a Manet-like faculty of placing the figure upon canvas. By the side of Josephson stands the dextrous, cos- mopolitan Anders Zorn, who brings to the altar of art every gift save the gift of soul. And along with Zorn come Lars- son and Liljefors, names familiar to lovers of Swedish art the world over. The preceding men are transitional figures, whereas with the rigorous Nordstrom, the sober-minded Wilhelmson, and notably with Hesselbom, Fjasstad, Kreu- ger, Prince Eugen, and Eugen Jansson we are confronted with tendencies more stylistic than naturalistic or impres- sionistic. The art of these painters and their younger col-

18 SCANDINAVIAN ART

leagues, such as Axel Torneman, is subjective and synthetic in spirit. It is not representation they seek but decoration, and their work is notable for its vigor of outline and appro- priate employment of color spaces. Beginning as modest lyrists, they have managed to endow their creations with monumental significance.

The contribution of this particular group, which is the most homogeneous unit in contemporary Swedish art, brings us to the debatable threshold of expressionism, which has already been crossed by Isaac Griinewald, Gosta Sandels, Einar John, Leander Engstrom, and kindred apostles of out and out modernism. The older men belong to a definite school, the men of the middle period participated in certain well defined movements, but these latest recruits to the cause give free range to a luxuriant individualism. The extreme manifestations of their art will doubtless, however, be modi- fied by the benign caress of time, for there is nothing like time to ameloriate the rigors of radicalism whether aesthetic or social.

The leading charactertistic of this work, be it conservative or experimental, is its sense of nationalism, its fidelity to native theme. Each of these artists has his favorite sketch- ing ground which he makes indisputably his own, Liljefors finds inspiration in the forest life of Uppland or among the skerries of the Smaland coast. Nordstrom evolves an aus- tere, stone-age mysticism out of the iron mountain ranges of Lapland and the shadowed hillsides of Bohuslan, while upon the blue waters of Stockholm harbor, fringed with its crescent of amber lights, Eugen Jansson breathes a luminous lyricism that for sheer poetic intensity is without parallel in the annals of contemporary painting. Nor is all modern Swedish art serious-minded, for with the drawings of Albert Engstrom, the characterful statuettes of "Doderhultaren," and the diverting evocations of Ossian Elgstrom and John Bauer we are led into a world where actuality gives place to humorous exaggeration or the touch of creative fantasy.

Whether in the stillness of snow-crusted forest with Fjaestad and Schultzberg, among the Lofoten Islands with

INTRODUCTION 19

Anna Boberg, or on the terrace of Prince Eugen's villa at Valdemarsudde, you instinctively feel that each of these painters approaches his theme with sincerity and conviction. The particular is here not infrequently infused with a sig- nificance that is general, and that which was local becomes typical. With the clarification of the modern palette Swed- ish painting has taken on fresh chromatic brilliancy. This art is more Swedish than was formerly the case. The national race consciousness has grown stronger and more eloquent alike of the outward vesture of nature and of that inner vision which fashions all things to its appointed purpose.

It is unnecessary in any degree to anticipate the able exposition of Mr. Laurin. His account of the development of Swedish architecture from the ecclesiastical period to the latest creations of Ferdinand Boberg, Gustav Clason, Rag- nar Ostberg, Carl Westman, and others is notably instruc- tive. His survey of Swedish plastic art, which carries us from the Giant Finn of Lund Cathedral to the neo-renais- sance yet modernistic compositions of Christian Eriksson and the varied inspiration of Carl Milles, is of equal merit and interest. You gather in fact from Mr. Laurin's text a general impression of flexibility and creative fecundity that augurs well for the future of Swedish art.

It may not be amiss to note by way of recapitulation, that art in Sweden did not long remain the exclusive property of the upper classes. It was not restricted to park and pal- ace, to the aristocratic confines of Gripsholm or Drottning- holm, but, reinforced by a basic peasant virility, it became a thing of the people and for the people. Carrying its bright- ness into cottage and home, bearing its message from Malmo to far off Kiruna beyond the arctic circle, it chants the vis- ible glory of Svea. At first a plaything and apanage of roy- alty and a powerful ring of nobles — of the Hedvig Eleon- oras and Axel Oxenstiernas of Swedish history — it finally won universal suffrage.

20 SCANDINAVIAN ART

II

There could be no stronger contrast than that afforded by a comparison between the art of eclectic, cosmopolitan Sweden and the home-loving production of the Dane. If the art of Sweden is extensive, that of Denmark represents an intensive development in close conformity with the polit- ical and social traditions of the country. The lyric quality already noted in the art of Sweden is also present in that of Denmark, only it is not a poignant cry of passion or disillu- sion. It more often takes the form of gentle mysticism or the simple charm of a fireside lullaby. Just as you find in Danish literature no Verner von Heidenstam or no Oscar Levertin, so you encounter in contemporary Danish painting no Eugen Jansson or no Karl Nordstrom, the integrity of whose vision is tinged by a deep-seated pessimism, a touch of cosmic austerity.

As you turn to Director Hannover's sympathetic presen- tation of Danish art you will not fail to gain an impression of homogeneous development. Danish art is indigenous. The treasures of early Danish painting and sculpture did not arrive in stately fashion from foreign lands as was the case with Gustav Ill's collection of statuary. They sprang from the happy hearts and healthy sensibilities of a people who had no restless visions of grandeur and world conquest, a people fervently attached to their serene little country. The Danes are addicted to an amused scepticism when it comes to matters beyond their immediate range of sympathy. The tendency was manifest at an early stage of their cultural development, and it has doubtless served to protect them from follies and exaggerations in various fields of activity.

Yet it must not be assumed that Danish art attained maturity without assistance from the outside world. Den- mark, like Sweden, sent abroad, chiefly to France, for her first architects and sculptors, while not a few of her painters journeyed to Rome or elsewhere in order to acquire that broader experience which was deemed essential to a proper practice of their profession. The fact nevertheless remains that these digressions did not materially alter the course of

INTRODUCTION 21

Danish art. As Director Hannover observes, there was no genuinely Danish painting before Eckersberg, and Eckers- berg himself had the sagacity not to be adversely influenced either by David in Paris or the specious neo-antique espoused by his countryman Thorvaldsen in Rome. Saving Pilo and Carstens but few of these men renounced their national affiliations. And as you study Constantin Hansen's portrait group depicting seven leading Danish artists, all former pupils of Eckersberg, foregathered in Hansen's Roman studio, you spontaneously assume that they are thinking and speaking of that endearing country to which they were shortly to return and whose more familiar aspects they were destined to celebrate.

Their preceptor, Christoffer Vilhelm Eckersberg, called the father of Danish painting, just as the Hamburger Ehren- strahl was known as the father of Swedish painting, and the Norwegian, Johan Christian Dahl, was later to become recognized as the parent of Norwegian painting, was a re- markably endowed artist. Temporarily interested in Italian subject, he found his true sphere of activity in depicting local theme — landscape, marines, and views of ships and shipping in the vicinity of Copenhagen. His gallery of portraits, in- cluding that of Thorvaldsen in the Kunstakademiet, is also of particular importance. Everything he left in fact pos- sesses a tranquil verity of vision and statement that no change of taste can ever discount.

You do not need, in a preliminary survey of early nine- teenth century Danish painting, to go beyond the three typical figures of Eckersberg, Kobke, and Marstrand. Each in his way reflects a distinct phase of the national temper- ament, and between them they offer a complete picture of native life and scene. At a period when the rest of Europe was absorbed in the cultivation of a passionless pseudo- classicism, the clear-eyed professor who dwelt in modest quarters at the Academy in Kongens Nytorv was content to transcribe reality with patient exactitude. It was upon a foundation of substantial objectivity that he based the struc- ture of modern Danish art. Following him comes Christen

22 SCANDINAVIAN ART

Schjellerup Kobke, who supplemented the constrained vision and handling of the older men with a fresh, sunlit beauty, a' brighter tonality, and a freer technique. The figure, not landscape, was Marstrand's preoccupation, and he in turn discarded the arid formalism of Abildgaard and Jens Juel and brought to Danish painting a humor, a grasp of char- acter, and a breadth of style that proved an infinite boon to the art of the day.

The successive steps in the evolution of Danish painting from the constriction of its early stages to the freedom of its new-found worship of light, color, and form are too com- prehensively indicated by Director Hannover to require more than passing mention. Following the eclipse of clas- sicism and the tinsel romanticism of the Diisseldorf period, came the ringing appeal to the nationalist consciousness enunciated by Hoyen, whose propensity for aesthetic preach- ment even rivalled that of Ruskin. This movement, which paved the way for Dalsgaard, Exner, Vermehren and similar exponents of peasant genre, failed to achieve significant re- sults for the reason that its devotees were lacking in technical proficiency. It was, in fact, not until the advent of the Paris trained talents that Danish painting was able to overcome that professional provinciality which had been its handicap from the outset

If the school of Eckersberg taught the Danish artist what to paint, it was the school of Skagen that taught him how to paint. Naturalistic at first, and by turns impressionistic and luministic, it was the flexible, acquisitive Peter Severin Kroyer who was the inspiration of the little colony of artists who set up their easels along the sunlit dunes of the Skaw and for the first time let into Danish painting the magic of light and air. More potent as an influence than as an endur- ing master, Kroyer, with his cosmopolitan cachet and dazzling manipulative dexterity, was the dynamic force of the movement. Whether in his vine-screened cottage at Skagen or in his sumptuously appointed studio in Bredgade, where used to take place those memorable evening musicales, he was always to the fore. Red-faced and white flanneled,

INTRODUCTION 23

he acted as the beacon, the Skagen Fyr, of the group, and once he pointed the way, the rest proceeded to flood Danish art, indoor as well as out, with the same tonic radiance.

A few paces from Kroyer's studio in Bredgade came to live a man of different stamp, not a versatile talent, eager to attack any pictorial problem, but a modest, retiring soul who shrank from the glare of day, who preferred the dimness of sparely furnished rooms or the mystic film of twilight on grey-green roof or dark castle wall. In Vilhelm Hammers- hoi Denmark produced an apostle of aesthetic quietism beside whom even Whistler seems restless and sophisticated. A product of neurasthenia this tremulous, penetrant work may be, yet it bids fair to survive the legacy of many a more emphatic talent. Along with Hammershoi should be men- tioned Ejnar Nielsen, whose severe, achromatic vision, somewhat indebted to the Italian Primitives and the pallid serenity of Puvis de Chavannes, possesses a lineal purity and a tonal restraint that lend it unique significance.

The subdued, crepuscular panels of Vilhelm Hammers- hoi, and the not infrequently pathological inspiration of Ejnar Nielsen, constitute an intermezzo in the forward progress of Danish painting, which, having acquired light through the efforts of Kroyer, next proceeded to add color through the chromatic opulence of Zahrtmann, and form through the vigorous plasticity of Willumsen. One of the most original figures in Danish art, and the possessor of a richly subjective color sense, Kristian Zahrtmann is also notable as a helpful and inspiring preceptor. Zahrtmann's Skole which has fostered such genuine talents as Johannes Larsen, Peter Hansen, and Fritz Syberg, has exercised a fruitful influence upon current Danish and also Norwegian painting. It has taught the lesson of nationalism through the development of a more conscious sense of individuality and a more definitely localized sphere of interest.

In the matter of individuality there is, however, no figure in Danish art whether in painting, sculpture, architecture, or decorative craftsmanship comparable with Jens Ferdinand Willumsen. The entire struggle for freedom from conven-

24 SCANDINAVIAN ART

tion and from the stupifying effect of academic somnolence centers in the fecund personality of Willumsen. Everything Willumsen touches acquires the precious boon of life and form. A protean genius, he has attacked in succession all phases of current artistic activity. Nor has he failed to leave his impress whether it be upon the starkly simplified facade of the Frie Udstilling building or a bit of polychrome pottery. Combative as well as creative, Willumsen waged a valiant battle for aesthetic liberty, and it is mainly through his efforts that the younger men of to-day owe their compar- ative immunity at the hands of a none too reverent public.

The recent developments of contemporary Danish art synchronize with similar manifestations in Sweden and Nor- way. The movement has been away from naturalism and impressionism and in the direction of decorative synthesis. The amazing fertility of the late Thorvald Bindesboll, the Danish William Morris, and the pre-Raphaelite inspiration of the brothers Skovgaard have aided in the fostering of a new group. A richer tonality, a more opulent feeling for mass, and a frank desire to combine beauty and utility are among the chief characteristics of the younger generation of painters, sculptors, architects, and designers. A species of new romanticism, an awakening to the subjective and stylistic possibilities "bi color and form has superceded the objectivity of the older men.

Danish art of to-day has gone a long way from the simple verity of Eckersberg and Kobke, and the patient observation of Lauritz Ring, who still resides in his flower-fronted cot- tage at Roskilde, a picturesque reminder of the past. Con- temporary Danish painting even possesses its expressionists and synchronists — some designate them as dysmorphists — who periodically enliven the exhibitions of Den Frie and the newer secessionist organization known as Gronningen. Yet despite its advanced pretentions the work of such men as Harald Giersing, Edvard Weie, Sigurd Swane, Aksel Jor- gensen, William Scharff and their colleagues remains essen- tially Danish. It is Danish just as the art of Willumsen, the aesthetic anarch of a decade or more ago, was reluctantly

INTRODUCTION 25

acknowledged to be Danish. That which indeed we first note in the production of these innovators are the departures from precedent, the exaggerations. On subsequent acquaint- ance we perceive that the difference between them and their predecessors has been all too slight.

It is the art briefly outlined in the foregoing paragraphs, together with the architecture of Martin Nyrop, H. B. Storck, and Hans Holm, and the sculpture of Willumsen, Freund, Hansen-Jacobsen, Kai Nielsen, and the Iceland- born Einar Jonsson, that reflect the present-day character of Danish aesthetic development. The illuminating presenta- tion of the subject by Director Hannover is so comprehen- sive that it merely remains to summarize one's general im- pressions. Danish art, like the Danish landscape or Dan- ish literature, possesses the faculty of not striving to trans- cend certain definite limitations. Dramatic intensity is absent. Yet while it is true that Danish letters boasts no Strindberg, no von Heidenstam, and no Levertin, it may well claim its Herman Bang or Jacobsen whose work, suffused with tender mysticism and lightened by flashes of humor, is typical of the modern Danish spirit.

And so it is in painting. When Kobke depicts a boat- landing party with the Dannebrog fluttering on the fresh morning breeze, when Lundbye paints a wide-horizoned stretch of his beloved Sjaslland, when Kyhn devotes himself to views of Jutland, or Skovgaard senior masses in monu- mental forms the beeches of Dyrehaven, we have something exclusively Danish. The same is true of Ring, Syberg, and Philipsen in their records of rural life and scene, nor is it otherwise with Julius Paulsen in his delicate landscape noc- turnes or Viggo Johansen in his particular province, for who has pictured the intimacies of domestic existence with more sympathetic insight than Johansen. There is no pre- tense here. It is all consistent and contained. We are far from the Salon machine concocted to astound a jaded public.

Danish art of to-day, having overcome certain early disa- bilities, reflects a wholesome equability of temper and a gen-

26 SCANDINAVIAN ART

erous measure of material well-being. This art is rich in tone and texture and discreetly sensuous in spirit. The splen- did assembly hall of Martin Nyrop's Raadhus radiates light and color, while Willumsen's playful putti disport them- selves with true abandon. Midway between the brilliant eclecticism and lyric exaltation of Sweden, and the stormy, ossianesque grandeur of Norway, stands the instinctive moderation, the natural amenity of Denmark. Having achieved a definite emotional and social stability, the Dane can well afford to remain himself, and to smile indulgently upon a stressful, unquiet world.

Ill

Entering the arena of art at a later date than Swede or Dane, the Norwegian possessed the priceless assets of youth, abounding energy, and freedom from precedent that enabled him to express himself with unhampered vigor and directness. The first thing that impresses one on viewing a representative collection of Norwegian painting, sculpture, or decorative art is its aspect of freshness and general ab- sence of fatigue. You may note a certain overconfidence, but you will rarely encounter echoes of empty traditionalism or a point of view that savors of academic anaemia.

The history of modern Norwegian art covers but a scant century of consecutive effort, yet within that period the Nor- wegian painter has nevertheless been able to place himself on even terms not alone with his Peninsular neighbors, but fully abreast of the broader currents of Continental artistic development. The realization that he started later, and consequently had more to achieve, proved an incentive rather than a detriment. And in order to diminish all disparity the Norwegian merely had to draw upon an unexploited wealth of vitality, aesthetic and physical.

The text of Director Thiis which you will herewith peruse is a model of constructive exposition. Working in a more or less virgin field, a field that he himself has largely cre- ated, Director Thiis is in a position to contribute pioneer criticism, and of this opportunity he takes full advantage.

INTRODUCTION 27

The profile of the period preceding the declaration of national independence in 1814 is bound to appear more or less sketchy on account of the paucity of data at hand, yet even this relatively remote epoch in the history of Nor- wegian art has its well defined tendencies and its outstand- ing personalities. Though for the most part of anonymous authorship, the early ecclesiastical or secular sculpture, paint- ing, and handicraftsmanship display characteristics that were destined to reappear at a subsequent date. New art is invariably conditioned by latent aesthetic instincts. The decorative fantasies of Gerhard Munthe are based upon century-old saga motifs; and it is by no means improbable that the hypersensitiveness of Edvard Munch, that feeling of cosmic fear which pervades his work, harks back to the primal awe of primitive man in the presence of the insolu- able enigma of nature.

Out of this somewhat dusky half-light emerges the rugged silhouette of Magnus Berg, a richly endowed craftsman who passed most of his life in Copenhagen, and left a legacy of deftly carved ivory groups displaying marked baroque influ- ence. It is Director Thiis's placing in relief of such figures as Berg, and rescuing from obscurity such comparatively un- known men as Mathias Stoltenberg, the provincial Nord- land portrait painter, and Lars Hertervig, an imaginative nature mystic who recalls our own Ryder or Blakelock, that lends his text its particular value. The Gudes and Tide- mands, like the Thorvaldsens, have been too persistently exploited. The public deserves to know something of less conventional types, and no one presents their respective cases with more authority than the scholarly, militant Director of the National Gallery of Norway. He is amply qualified for such a task, having already done much to force acceptance of Munch and to win proper recognition for the Norwegian plastic genius Gustav Vigeland.

It is in fact this same militancy of spirit that distinguishes Norwegian art and letters in general. The leading figures stand starkly forth as though rough-hewn from the native rock. And to those given to indulging in symbols, the view

28 SCANDINAVIAN ART

of Dahl's storm-tossed birch tree buffeted by the wind yet clinging to its stony base may well seem typical of the entire course of Norwegian art. Cast in heroic mould, these men have forged their way to the front through sheer power and persistence. There is not, even to this day, in Norway such a thing as an academy of art, royal or national, and technical instruction has necessarily been difficult to obtain. The pioneers were largely self-taught. Berg was a simple rustic who began life as a woodcarver. Dahl was the son of a humble fisherman and ferryman of Bergen. These men were not protected by kings and nobles as were the Swedes, nor were they reared amid the security of a solidly estab- lished social order as were the Danes. Almost without exception they fought their battles single-handed, and many of them are still indulging in this same salutary pastime.

Such conditions have not been without effect upon the development of the arts in Norway. You meet in this work a degree of individualism not apparent in the production of Sweden or Denmark. There are of course marked affin- ities between one artist and another, or one group of artists and another, yet each man stands firmly upon his own feet. The art of Norway does not fall into the category of a sharply defined school, as for example is the case with the art of Holland or of Denmark. Its progress is uneven. It does not proceed upon its course with placid uniformity. It advances intermittently, not to say explosively. There was something meteor-like in the rapid rise to fame and Euro- pean position of Johan Christian Dahl, the father of con- temporary Norwegian painting, and on more than one occasion the world has been startled by the sudden eruption of a fresh-born Norwegian genius of letters or art.

When Dahl eventually located in Dresden as professor of landscape at the Kunstakademie, pallid neo-classicism had been superseded by a romantic nature poetry and a taste for theatric peasant genre. While it was impossible even for this sturdy son of West Coast fisherfolk to escape the pre- tense of the period, it is to his credit that, during long resi- dence abroad, he never ceased to remain Norwegian at

INTRODUCTION 29

heart. He did not devote his energies to the portrayal of moonlit ruins on the Rhine or the fateful Lorelei. Every summer he journeyed homeward where he passed the time sketching among the fjords and mountains of his native land. While his work remained romantic, it never lost con- tact with reality. It pulsates with dramatic passion, with genuine bardic power, yet it is based upon actual observa- tion. And what is true of Dahl is even more true of his suc- cessor Fearnley, and of the deeply lyrical Cappelen who died while still in his twenties.

From the outset these men displayed a vigorous intensity of statement that to this day has remained typical of Nor- wegian painting. Even the panoramic Gude and the popu- lar exponent of peasant life, Adolf Tidemand, had their moments of genuine veracity. And once the specious glam- our of poetic sentiment had been dispelled, and the Nor- wegian painter was permitted to see nature in her true aspect, this faculty came more prominently to the fore. The older men down to the time of Amaldus Nielsen and Ludvig Munthe studied in Diisseldorf. The succeeding generation drifted to Munich and Paris. In due course the pictorial insincerity of Schirmer and Lessing and the anecdotal inan- ities of Knaus and Vautier vanished with the increasing vogue of an art based upon a closer study of nature and a more accurate comprehension of existing visual phenomena. Teutonic romanticism gave place to Gallic rationalism, to an art that endeavored to place the eye upon a parity with the mind, to supplement sentiment and imagination with first- hand observation.

Erik Werenskiold was the earliest Norwegian painter to sense the impending change and adjust himself to the new order of things. In 1879 ne saw tne memorable French exhibition in Munich, and straightway wrote to his col- leagues that the Bavarian capital was dead as an art center. With ready receptivity he realized that the forward move- ment pointed away from the studio claptrap of Piloty and Lofftz toward the sturdy terrestrialism of Gustave Courbet and the fresh graphic vision of Edouard Manet. His advice

30 SCANDINAVIAN ART

was fortunately followed, and between 1880 and 1883 most of- the progressive Norwegian painters foregathered in Paris to admire and emulate the grey-green harmonies of Cazin, the sober peasant vision of Bastien-Lepage, or the rude proletarian touch of Roll. Eilif Peterssen, Hans Heyerdahl, Werenskiold himself, Fredrik Collett, Frits Thaulow, and Edvard Diriks formed the vanguard of the new movement. And one by one they returned to their native country bearing with them the inspiring message that precipitated a veritable revolution in the province of pic- torial representation.

The Norwegians espoused the gospel of naturalism in all sincerity, each pursuing his pathway with independence of spirit. That same tendency which in Sweden initiated a school of synthetic landscape interpreters, and in Denmark fostered a genuine decorative renaissance, aroused in Nor- way a different set of reactions. In particular it gave birth to a group afflicted with social and pathological sympathies. In literature this coterie included Hans Jasger, Arne Garborg, Gunnar Heiberg, and Knut Hamsun, and in art found its leading exponents in Christian Krohg and Edvard Munch. Robust and defiantly objective looms the massive form of Krohg, while in the shadowland of an acute subjectivity lingers the solitary, enigmatic apparition of Munch.

Though Krohg, the epic apostle of Zolaism in paint, has undergone numerous vicissitudes, his militancy of temper and mental vigor remain unimpaired. Seated in the garden of his fjord-side home at Drobak, grizzley and primeval, he seems to epitomize the stressful epoch of which, with pen as well as brush, he was for years the living incarnation. The complexion of Norwegian art has altered during the last decade. Of the actual pioneers several have passed away. Yet Diriks has not entirely deserted Drobak for Paris, while upon the pine-crested heights of Lysaker, over- looking the upper reaches of the Christiania fjord, still reside Eilif Peterssen, Gerhard Munthe, and Erik Werenskiold whose talented son Dagfin carries promisingly forward the paternal tradition.

INTRODUCTION 31

The rigors of naturalism were followed by the delicate irradiance of impressionism, which in due course was suc- ceeded by the new romantic spirit of which the late Halfdan Egedius was the initial exponent. Many of the younger men, the generation of the nineties, including Erichsen, Folkestad, Kavli, Onsager, and Wold-Torne received their professional training in Copenhagen, mainly under Zahrt- mann, and their work consequently reflects not a little of the stylistic and coloristic traditions of the contemporary Danish school. Holmboe, a somewhat older man, is also allied to the decorative romanticists, while Harald Sohlberg adds to the main characteristics of the movement a visual restraint and a concentrated emotional intensity that entitle him to a place apart from the rest of his colleagues.

In a measure a product of the naturalism of the early and middle eighties of the past century, and also represent- ing a sharp reaction against naturalistic tendencies, stands Edvard Munch, the unchallenged head of the modern movement in Scandinavian art. The enthusiasm with which Director Thiis pens his apologia for Munch is by no means misplaced, though it is safe to say that Munch's position in European painting and graphic art is not yet adequately appreciated in his own country. Edvard Munch is a born pictorial fantast. From the recesses of a responsive con- sciousness he evokes images plastic and graphic the like of which cannot be met outside the pages of Poe and Baudelaire or the portfolios of Felicien Rops and Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec. The inspiration of Munch is not however South- ern, it is purely Nordic. You may possibly recall the Berlin of the early nineties on viewing some of the initial graphic studies, but never the Boulevards. The significance of this art lies in its affinity, its power of identification, with the vis- ible universe. In these broadly brushed canvases and strongly accented lithographs we are made to wander by dark waters, under pale, far stars and over mountains toward the rim of the world where we stand transfixed with tragic appre- hension.

It is part of Munch's deep-rooted pessimism that in his

32 SCANDINAVIAN ART

work he should reduce the human equation to minor propor- tions when brought face to face with the inscrutable physi- ognomy of nature. Alike in his paintings, mural decora- tions, or in the field of graphic expression Edvard Munch remains the commanding figure in Northern art. He is the apotheosis of that tendency which is farthest removed from the fixed form of the Greeks and Latins. The potency of this art lies not in its capacity for definite realization but in its magic power of suggestion. We have here moved beyond the radiance of the meridional sun into sub-arctic twilight where fantasy wins its silent, almost imperceptible victory over fact.

Under the aegis of Edvard Munch have sprung into con- sciousness a number of artists more or less directly influ- enced by him, though revealing the approved Norwegian capacity for independent expression. They share his free- dom from the tyranny of form, his suggestive coloration, and his sympathy with the modern movement whether in Scandinavia or on the Continent. Of this group Henrik Lund and Ludvig Karsten are the most prominent repre- sentatives, while Per Krohg, the progressive son of a father who in his day was equally advanced, carries the programme of modernism still farther along its vaguely charted path- way. One and all they are effective draughtsmen and exu- berant colorists. " Displaying familiarity with Manet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Henri-Matisse, and Picasso, they con- stitute the advance guard of Norwegian painting.

The complexion of Norwegian art in fact changes with re- freshing rapidity, for whereas formerly we felt in the work of Fearnley and Cappelen the beating of the wings of roman- tic aspiration, to-day we no less distinctly sense the stir of aes- thetic radicalism. A scant decade ago the outstanding figures, apart from Munch, were Lund, with his swift psychological insight and Manet-like saliency of stroke, and Karsten, whose canvases revealed a chromatic vigor and a freedom of draughtsmanship new to their generation. In 19 14, how- ever, occurred the debut of a new group known as De f jorten, among whom were Sorensen, Heiberg, Per Deberitz, Thyge-

INTRODUCTION 33

sen, and Revold. All are, of course, ardent modernists, and during the past half dozen years not a few of them have found their final emancipation in abstract formulae. For the rigorous realism of the eighties, the neo-romanticism of the nineties, the delicate shimmer of impressionism, and the intervening manifestations of a questing creative conscious- ness have meanwhile merged into that broad category which may best be characterized as expressionism.

You see the work of these artists in the current exhibi- tions, and you meet the men themselves, now in the cafe of the Grand Hotel, now in Copenhagen, or next in Paris where they sip their liqueurs or modest bocs at the Cafe de la Regence, just as the former generation of Northern artists used to frequent the Cafe de l'Hermitage. What they have to say about, and in, paint they say with assurance. So much downright, unspoiled capacity for pictorial expression do they display, that one is constrained to conclude that it may be just as well, after all, that Norway should still boast no official academy of art. For, had it such an institution, it is by no means certain that these truculent young radicals would condescend to darken its threshold.

We shall leave to Director Thiis the congenial task of tracing the artistic physiognomy of Norway's most distin- guished sculptor, Gustav Vigeland. His predecessors in the field, prominent among whom were Julius Middelthun, Brynjulf Bergslien, and the stressful and by no means subtle Stephan Sinding, are likewise thrown into characteristic relief upon Director Thiis's pages. The story of Norwegian sculp- ture is brief, as is also that of Norwegian architecture. It is in painting, and in the minor handicrafts, particularly weaving, that the greatest progress has been made. And here again you will note the same strength of color that you find on canvas. For while the Swede is notable for the gift of decorative synthesis, and the Dane exhibits a highly devel- oped sense of form, color is the chief contribution of the Norwegian.

In surveying Scandinavian art as presented throughout the ensuing pages, you will readily discover the lyric

34 SCANDINAVIAN ART

mood already mentioned, for it is manifest almost every- where in the production of these Northmen to whom emotion has not infrequently proved of more significance than mere substance or form. Detached, and in a measure iso- lated though the artistic activity of these peoples has perforce been, their contribution in certain instances transcends that which is merely local in appeal. With the work of such men as Sergei, Thorvaldsen, and the troubled, aspiring Munch, this art attains true universality of utterance. And yet, while such manifestations constitute its moments of supreme ex- pression, it everywhere commands respect through its genuine creative fecundity, and above all through its virile, organic nationalism. It is in brief by bringing forth the native rich- ness of spirit, and not relying upon atelier and academy, that Scandinavian art has won its present position in the larger pageant of pictorial and plastic aspiration.

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART

By

CARL G. LAURIN

Author of Konsthistoria, Sweden Through The Artist's Eye, Etc.

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART

By Carl G. Laurin

I

THE ECCLESIASTICAL PERIOD

NUMEROUS relics of ancient times bear witness to the high peasant culture possessed by Sweden thou- sands of years before the Christian Era. The finely- shaped swords and the spiral ornaments on buckles and shield-plates of the Bronze Age reveal the presence of artis- tic taste and skilled craftsmanship in our country before the Persians encountered the Greeks. At a much later period, the Germanic peoples, under impulses from classic civiliza- tion, evolved an arabesque form of ornamentation, which spread southward to Italy with the Lombards, and north- ward to England and Ireland. From Erin's Isle the ara- besque was again transplanted to the North, where it under- went a varied development, as may be seen in the decorative convolutions on certain rune stones, found principally in central Sweden, and executed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Erected at a time when the Romanesque school dominated the continent, these runic monuments often show Romanesque influence in the style of their ornamentations, and the same is true of the old Norse forms of decoration that were revived in the boldly fantastic, marvellously well executed portals of the Norwegian wooden stave-churches as well as in the remains of the Swedish. The first churches in Sweden, like the houses and temples of pagan times, were of wood.

After i ioo, stone churches became more and more com- mon. In the twelfth century, Lund Cathedral was dedicated,

37

38

SCANDINAVIAN ART

The crypt of Lund Cathedral with the Giant Finn embracing one of the columns

though it has, of course, been altered and repaired several times since its erection. Built by Canute the Holy, it was designed after the Romanesque temples of the Rhine district. It was thoroughly repaired in the beginning of the sixteenth century under the supervision of the Westphalian master- builder, Adam varf Diiren, and during the nineteenth cen- tury it was subjected to a crude restoration. The choir is adorned with richly carved Gothic stalls, executed about the year 1400. The magnificent crypt, resting on columns with square capitals, extends beneath the chancel and transept. The oldest sculpture of the cathedral is the so-called Giant Finn, who embraces one of the columns of the crypt. It is considered by many to represent Samson. In the last decade of the twelfth century, Gumlosa Church in Skane, about twenty kilometers northwest of Kristianstad was dedicated. It was covered by a cross-vault, and was built of brick, with the tower and the roof ornamented by corbie-step gables. These latter, which were added subsequently, constitute, naturally enough, a characteristic of brick architecture, and are often found on the church buildings that rise on the

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART

39

waving grain fields of Skane or gleam among the beech wood- lands of Sjaelland. Now and then, these edifices were given a round form, but more often they were constructed with a single rectangular nave. The walls of the small country churches were as thick as fortresses, and during these times, when there was a constant state of war, they were in fact sometimes used as forts. The steeple was not considered a necessity, and several of our foremost abbeys and cathedrals had no steeples, but when it became the custom in many country districts, especially in Gotland, to erect towers for defense, known as castellets, it was ultimately found prac- tical to build these towers, adjoining the church. The Keep in Halsingborg, a remnant of the defenses of the city, prob- ably dating back to the twelfth century, is one of the few secular constructions from olden times in Sweden.

In the region of Vastergotland, where Christian Swedish culture first made its appearance, the abbey of Varnhem indicates a French arrangement of choir and chapels. The monastery of Varnhem was founded about 1150 by monks

The abbey of Varnhem completed in the thirteenth century

40

SCANDINAVIAN ART

The choir in the abbey of Varnhem presaging the Gothic style

of the Bernardine order. On the plain below Billingen, the white walls of the venerable church gleam through the ver- dure. The edifice was not completed until the middle of the thirteenth century, and its interior presages the introduc- tion of the Gothic style. The Gothic cathedral of Skara, with its abruptly terminating choir, has been much altered in the course of its manifold reconstructions. The original building, like the present one, was characterized by triforia. In the city of Sigtuna, on Lake Malaren, there were a num- ber of churches erected in the twelfth century in the Roman- esque style, but unfortunately these are now in ruins.

Without doubt, Gotland was the Swedish province where

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART

41

The lower story of the peculiar double church of the Helgeandsorden at Visby, now a ruin

the art of building attained its highest development during the Middle Ages. The active mercantile relations of the island with Russia and northern Germany, the presence of a wealthy German-Swedish middle class in Visby, and the abundance of sandstone and limestone were factors in pro-

42

SCANDINAVIAN ART

ducing a richer architecture than that on the mainland. The golden period falls in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and many a stately church sprang up between the corbie-step gables of the burghers' houses, behind the defiant city wall with its bartizans and earth-bound towers. The peculiar double church of the Helgeandsorden dates presumably from the beginning of the thirteenth century, and reveals the mingling of Romanesque and Gothic forms characteristic of the period. It is an octagonal, centralized construction,

Dalhem Church typical of the country churches in Gotland

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART

43

The portal of Etelhem Church with the union of Romanesque and Gothic characteristic of Got- land churches

with two stories connected by flights of stairs and by an opening two meters wide in the floor of the second story. In all probability, one part was intended for the sick and the poor, the other for the wealthy supporters and friends of the Order among the merchant aristocracy of Visby. Unfortunately the Helgeandskyrka, like all churches of Visby — with the exception of the St. Maria Cathedral — is a ruin, though tolerably well preserved. The Gothic choir of St. Karin belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, and must therefore have been built immediately after Valdemar Atterdag sacked the city in 1 361, when the Danish ships were loaded with several barrels of shining Visby coins minted with the figures of the lamb and the lily. The

44 SCANDINAVIAN ART

majority of the churches on Gotland were enlarged or re- built during the Gothic period.

In the country districts of Gotland the churches are better preserved. Dalhem Church, dedicated in the beginning of the thirteenth century, has a tower that is typical of many of the country churches of Gotland; the lower part is Roman- esque; the upper part has been added later and has pointed

View of the interior of Etelhern Church showing the central column

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART

45

arches. In its interior it is a hall church, resting upon slender columns with the square capitals characteristic of northern Europe. In several churches the nave was covered by four cross vaults, resting upon one central column, as in the Etelhem Church. As an example of the Gotland portals with their union of Romanesque and Gothic forms, and with a lintel resembling the Romanesque ornamentation in wood, the portal of Etelhem Church may be mentioned.

The nave of Linkoping Cathedral showing English influence

Gotland belonged to the bishopric of Linkoping, and with the help of the Gotlanders, who were skilled in stone work, one of the most stately cathedrals of the land was erected in the city of Linkoping. Its predominating style, however, was English. It took a long time to build Lin- koping Cathedral. It is said to have been begun shortly after the year 1200, and the construction went on during the whole of the thirteenth century,- the first half of the four- teenth— the work was interrupted by the Great Plague — and the fifteenth century. The west towers, which were a

46

SCANDINAVIAN ART

The south portal of Linkoping Cathedral showing the influence of the Gotland church buildings

part of the plan, were never erected. The church had a greater richness of ornamentation than any seen before in our land. The interior consisted of a three-naved body, forming a hall-church with a later Gothic choir and ambu- latory. The construction of the choir was begun in the early part of the fifteenth century by a Master Gierlac from Cologne, and was completed about a hundred years later by other "Cologne ma*ster-men." The magnificent south por- tal betrayed clearly a Gotlandic influence.

On the plain of Uppland, Sweden's largest cathedral edifice, Uppsala Cathedral, stands as the foremost example of Swedish brick architecture in the Gothic style. Numer- ous fires, restorations, and finally a complete reconstruc- tion in 1 885-1 893 have considerably changed the old church, but the interior, the plan, and certain details still remain from the medieval period. The foundations were laid during the second half of the thirteenth century, and during the whole of the following century papal indulgences were granted to those who contributed gifts for its erection. The cathedral was not dedicated until 1435, and was not even then entirely finished. The plan is northern French. It is a three-naved basilica, that is, it possesses a central

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART

47

body provided with windows and consequently higher than the side naves. A row of chapels extends around the whole church — an arrangement typical of the Baltic region. The choir has the characteristic French form with an encircling ambulatory and a row of chapels, the central one of which contains the stately Sarcophagus of Gustavus Vasa, made in the Netherlands. The fresco paintings added in the thir- ties of the nineteenth century are painted by Johan Gustav

Sculpture on a console in Uppsala Cathedral representing Jews being suckled by a sow

Sandberg, and treat of the historical events in the life of Gustavus Vasa according to the conceptions prevalent in that period. The interior of the church measures 107 meters in length, 27 meters in height, and is for the most part newly decorated.

Among the more noteworthy remains from medieval times still seen in the church are the consoles, originally pedestals for statues that have since disappeared, which now adorn the pillars near the choir-ambulatory. The sculptures that grace the consoles were in all probability exe-

48 SCANDINAVIAN ART

cuted by Gotlandic sculptors about 1350, and represent naively, but with considerable faithfulness of description, medieval legends and symbols and even a brutal anti-Semitic raillery. Jews and pigs are seen tumbling over one another with obvious friendliness, an illustration that calls to mind the coarseness of medieval sermons, spiced for the special benefit of the congregation. The French sculptor, Etienne de Bonneuil, and his journeymen worked on the cathedral the last years of the thirteenth century. Back of the high altar, near which Archbishop Jons Bengtsson Oxenstierna swore at one time not to exchange armor and sword for the bishop's hat and staff until he had driven Karl Knutsson out of the land, stands the "Gilded" silver shrine of St. Eric — the present one executed by a Danish goldsmith during the reign of Johan III — containing the bones of the saint, which were brought here from Old Uppsala in 1273. The pulpit, carved by the sculptor Burchardt Precht after drawings by Nikodemus Tessin the Younger, was set up early in the eighteenth century and is a master example of the most luxu- rious baroque, well suited to the pompous and endless sermons of the Carolinian age. Precht carved also the magnificent altar-piece in the baroque style, which adorned the church for almost two hundred years, until it was re- moved at the time, of the restoration, and replaced by a new one in the Gothic style of 1890. This remarkable work of art was sculptured by Precht strongly influenced by the design of the altar of St. Ignatius by Padre Pozzo; it is now in the Vasa Church in Stockholm. The exterior of the cathedral has undergone, if possible, yet greater changes. About the year 1400, two enormous brick towers of the North German style with buttresses were erected. In the course of time, the spires have had a great variety of forms. During the seventeenth century, the church had spires in the baroque style and a smaller spire or ridge- turret directly over the intersection-point of the roofs. The fire of 1702 did violent damage to the cathedral. In the restoration which followed thereupon, the arch-buttresses and ridge-turret were removed, and the architect Harleman

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART 49

erected those tower-caps which gave their characteristic stamp to the Uppsala of Linne and Geijer. The recon- structed building, which was completed in the nineties of the last century, is an attempt to give the church again a kind of French-Gothic appearance in the cheapest and quick- est way by removing the alterations that have accrued through the centuries. The old, venerable tower-caps were torn down, the tower fagades were redone, and phialae and fountains were done in cement, since in our day we could not "afford" to use cut stone for the first church of the kingdom. In contrast with this thin and cheap cement- Gothicism, the beautiful south portal, erected early in the fourteenth century at the expense of Chancellor Ambjorn Sparre, produces an effect of unusual charm through the beauty of its sculpture and the richness of its material.

Two important brick churches are the old cathedrals of Vasteras and Strangnas, which have been several times re- built, and which in the latter half of the fifteenth century received new choirs. The recently restored Strangnas Cathedral, with its picturesque tower in the baroque style and its red brick walls rising out of the verdure, is certainly through its location and also in other ways one of Sweden's most beautiful cathedrals.

Most notable among the churches of the late Middle Ages is the abbey of Vadstena, built of limestone with the choir toward the west, according to the directions of St. Birgitta, as prescribed and revealed to her by Christ. The fifteenth century — the chapel was dedicated in 1430 — was the golden age of the abbey and convent. The bluish-grey limestone walls of this towerless church were surrounded by the most luxuriant vegetation, for the monks and nuns of the Briggittine order were zealous gardeners and pos- sessed an appreciation of the beauties of nature. Many believers visited the beautiful convent-chapel on the shore of Lake Vattern and found solace in the sight of the Holy Virgin's milk, a precious relic which was preserved there. The interior is supported by simple, octagonal pillars, and the roof is made up of graceful, ribbed vaulting.

50

SCANDINAVIAN ART

Baptismal font executed in Gotland, about the year 1200,

used in Tingstad church in Ostergotland. The reliefs

around the cuppa represent the Three Wise Men and

other incidents from the childhood of Christ

Sculpture and painting were very little developed in Sweden during the Middle Ages. The sculpture on the portals of the cathedrals has already been mentioned. There was not much art in the ordinary Swedish country church during the Middle Ages, but sometimes the baptismal font would be a real work of art, with a cuppa, or bowl, embellished with carved arabesques or reliefs. The sacred vessels were also of noble form and decked with precious stones. Pictures of Mary and the saints, all sculptured in wood in adherence to the prevailing tendencies of art on the Continent, were not uncommon. Large carved crucifixes were sometimes suspended in the triumphal arch, the vault of the chancel. Now and then, during the earlier Middle Ages, the altar in Sweden was beautified also by a sculp- tured tablet of wood or metal, the antemensale. This form of altar-decoration was succeeded during the fourteenth

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART 51

century by tabernacles placed back of the altar with figures of the madonna and the saints. Toward the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, taber- nacles of unusually magnificent workmanship were imported from the Netherlands. In these so-called mystery taber- nacles, the figures, formerly so rigid, were brought together dramatically to reproduce situations from Sacred History, arranged in groups reminiscent of scenes from the Mystery Plays, and installed in small niches. The figures were carved in wood, and were painted and gilded, so that the whole assumed a character of wrought gold in conformity with the essence of the Gothic style. All this was seen when the tabernacle was open; when it was closed, only the paint- ings on the outside door were exposed to view.

A number of magnificent tabernacles were also imported from Germany, of which the most important was completed in the year 1468 in Liibeck for the Storkyrka in Stockholm. It is now preserved in Statens Historiska Museum. One of the most beautiful German tabernacles is one ornamented by painting and sculptures, which was executed early in the sixteenth century and is now found in the Stadskyrka of Koping. Here, however, the figures were set up one by one, just as in the older altar cabinets. Even individual madonna figures were inserted in tabernacles with painted doors; for example, the unusually charming madonna, which is preserved in Sorunda Church in Sodertorn, where Mary, clad in gold brocade with a golden crown, is sur- rounded by the four mother virgins, Saints Barbara, Doro- thea, Catherine, and Margaret, painted on the doors. This work of art was executed in Liibeck about 1480. In the preservation of such partly destroyed and often dispersed and slighted works of art as baptismal fonts, crucifixes, and tabernacles, which form so important a part in our country's history of art and aesthetic beauty, the well-directed, prac- tical, and energetic measures of Docent J. Roosval and Pro- fessor S. Curman have earned the gratitude of our nation.

In the so-called triumphal arch, the arch which separates the choir from the nave, there often hung what was termed

52

SCANDINAVIAN ART

The madonna tabernacle in Sorunda church in Sodertorn, where

the Virgin Mary is surrounded by the four mother virgins. Executed

about 1480 in Herman Rode's workshop in Liibeck.

a triumph crucifix, and the most artistically finished of these is a figure of the crucified Savior, with the symbols of the Evangelists on the four ends of the cross, executed in painted wood about 1440. The well-nigh naturalistic treatment of the design calls to mind the Spanish wood sculptures of the seventeenth century. It has been hanging in the abbey of Vadstena since medieval times.

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53

The triumph crucifix in the abbey of Vadstena, called "Salvator i

Wadstena," supposed to have been made by a German master about

the year 1440

Gustavus Adolphus was accustomed to say that, "in Sweden there were above others three great masterpieces: the Knight St. Goran in Stockholm, the altar painting in Linkoping (by the Dutchman Hemskerk), and the Salvator

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SCANDINAVIAN ART

St. Goran and the Dragon, sculpture in wood by Berndt Notke, from about the year 1489. In the Storkyrka at Stockholm

in Vadstena." The foremost example of medieval Swedish sculpture is the enormous statue of St. Goran and the Dragon, paid for by national subscription, and set up, in 1480, in the Storkyrka in Stockholm by Sten Sture the Elder

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART 55

to commemorate his victory at Brunkeberg, 147 1.* The statue, which is executed in wood and painted, was carved by the German artist, Berndt Notke. In a youthful spirit of combat, the patron saint of warriors attacks the dragon with his sword, and the terrible monster, from whose skin pro- tuberances have grown like moose horns, roars, and in his death-struggle clutches with one of his claws the broken lance of the saint. The kneeling rescued maiden reminds us of the noble Swedish women who, while the battle was raging on the slopes of Brunkeberg Ridge, sent up fervent prayers for the life and victory of their knights.

The Storkyrka in Stockholm, built by Birger Jarl and first called bykyrkan (the village church) was sacred to the patron saint of sea-farers, St. Nicholas. The interior, which has been. finished with great taste and care, is one of the most beautiful church interiors of our country. Besides the above-mentioned St. Goran and the Dragon, the temple is adorned by a magnificent altar-piece made of silver, ivory, and ebony, which was presented to the church in the middle of the seventeenth century by the royal councillor, Adler Salvius, replacing the old tabernacle made in 1460-1470 which is now preserved in Statens Historiska Museum. Be- fore it stands a seven-armed, medieval, bronze candlestick of enormous size, a gift from the middle of the fourteenth century of King Magnus Eriksson. A number of pomp- ously gilded epitaphs from the late Renaissance illumine the solemn brick vaults. Strangnas Cathedral received at the close of the fifteenth century, from Bishop Kort Rogge, a

* The figure of St. Goran (St. George) was allowed to stand for nearly four hundred years in the Storkyrka where "the great Goran" aroused the interest of all church attendants, and not least of the country people who came to Stockholm. Carl Larsson tells us what a strong impression the fantastic group made upon him as a boy. In 1866 the statue was moved to the National Museum, where it was set up in a dark and very unsuitable place, and stood there in obscurity until 1907, when it was reclaimed by the Storkyrka. In 1912 a bronze copy of St. Goran was set up on Kopman- brinken in Stockholm. The princess was added in 1913. From the stand- point of beauty, the arrangement of this whole group is, I dare say, the happiest that any work of sculpture, placed out of doors, has received in our land.

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Altar tabernacle in Strangnas Cathedral with sculptures representing

Christ being taken down from the cross. Made in Brussels about

the year 1490

tabernacle in painted wood sculpture, which was executed in the Netherlands.

In the thirteenth century people commenced to decorate the walls of the churches, and the mural paintings in Rada Church in Varmland, from the century following, are still preserved. During the fifteenth century, mural painting in

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57

Unicorn pursued by the Angel Gabriel, painting in the ceiling of Osmo Church in Sodertorn

churches became very common. The paintings on the ceil- ing of Osmo Church in Sodertorn date from the middle of this century. One of these represents the popular legend of the unicorn, when pursued by the angel Gabriel equipped with dogs and hunting-horn, taking refuge with the Holy Virgin.

II

THE CASTLES OF THE VASAS. AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR

DURING the reign of the Vasa kings, the Church was obscured by the royal power. Communion cups and silver crucifixes found their way into the State treasury, monasteries were suppressed, and church-building — there was already a superabundance of churches — ceased. The economical rule of King Gosta did not permit art to flourish. The fortified castles and palaces of the realm, which had fared badly during the War of Liberation, had to be put in good condition first, before one could consider their artistic adornment. Kalmar Castle and the Royal Palace in Stockholm were repaired during the last years of Gustavus Vasa's reign, but, despite their interior renovation, they maintained their stern medieval exterior. The archi- tects and artists of fhis period were mostly Germans and Dutchmen, which was natural enough, since the Swedish bourgeoisie, both at that time and during a large part of the seventeenth century, was mixed with a very considerable German and Flemish-Dutch element.

In the year 1537, Gustavus Vasa built Gripsholm Castle, which was enlarged by Charles IX duping the last years of the sixteenth century. Ponderous brick walls enclose two irregular courtyards, the smaller bounded by four round towers with walls three or four meters thick, where the deep embrasures are like small rooms, from which the Malaren bay and the castle park may be seen. The room in the tower from which Duke Charles looked out over his Sodermanland has been preserved without any changes; the wooden wainscoting of the walls have a Renaissance char-

58

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART

59

J8D< JQ 1 '

s^wJmBB1

Vadstena Castle on Lake Vattern, built by Gustavus Vasa. View showing one of the richly ornamented gables that were added later

acter, but are simple in form; the white ceiling is decorated with a vine-ornamentation, painted by an artisan from Strangnas, and the bed, engirded by pilasters of the Renais- sance style, is built into the wall. To this bed there came

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SCANDINAVIAN ART

often, no doubt, gloomy thoughts, when the austere duke brooded over Sigismund, who was born in Gripsholm, or remembered how his brothers, Eric and Johan, with hearts full of hate, had imprisoned each other in this castle. Queen Hedvig Eleonora made Gripsholm her home during her long widowhood. She enlarged the castle, but it under- went yet greater alterations during the reign of Gustavus III. The substantial church tower was then renovated to form a coquettish theatre in the Gustavian style, where the members of the court and the royal family appeared in the performances. Several rooms were fitted up in the charm- ing style of the eighteenth century; silk shoes tripped on the narrow stairways, and the gay laughter of the court ladies chased away all gloomy memories from the castle. In the nineties of the last century, the castle was restored.

Although Vadstena Castle, built in 1545, was intended first of all to serve as a military base in case of an attack from the south, it became in several respects Sweden's most important Renaissance palace. Built of greyish stone, with high and richly ornamented gables, added during the first

King Eric XIV's room in Kalmar Castle, decorated with a relief frieze representing hunting scenes in painted stucco

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61

decade of the seventeenth century, and with its Dor- ic portals of stone artis- tically carved, it produces an impression resembling the mansions of the Ger- man-Dutch princes.

A third castle, which shows Sweden's early Renaissance, the so- called Vasa style with its union of medieval archi- tecture and Renaissance ornament (compare the style of Francis I, in France, for we were al- ways a few decades be- hind Central Europe) is "the key of Sweden," Kalmar Castle. In the apartment de luxe of the castle lived Eric XIV, and here the gifted prince could receive his counts and barons in royal fash- ion. It is claimed that the king himself, who

was interested in art, contributed with his own hand to the decoration of King Eric's apartment, where a panel with Corinthian columns, a relief-frieze with hunting figures in painted stucco, and doors inlaid with different kinds of wood formed a suitable frame for the court of the brilliant Renais- sance monarch.

The wealthy and splendor-loving Danish nobility built in Skane, especially during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, a number of magnificent castles and strongholds, of which some are still preserved. Such are Glimmingehus, of which the foundation was laid in

Fountain set up in the court of Kalmar Castle by Johan III, the work of Dominicus Pahr and Ro- land Mackle

SCANDINAVIAN ART

Svenstorp castle near Lund in Skane, built in 1596

1499; Borgeby near Lund; Vittskovle, which is situated a short distance from Kristianstad and mirrors its proud walls in the water of the canals; Skarhult near Eslov; and most notable of all, Svenstorp in the vicinity of Lund, constructed about 1590, and the most stately and the most nobly con- ceived of these castles. Trefaldighetskyrkan in Kristian- stad, completed in 1628, is also built in this Danish brick Renaissance style.

Johan III had a real mania for architecture. He added to the decorations of Kalmar Castle, and set up in the court a fine fountain, the severe Doric forms of which are enlivened by escutcheons and grinning faces, the whole crowned by a dolphin. King Johan, concerning whom Johan Messenius said,

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART 63

"Well would he, as I have learned, Stockholm into Rome and Venice have turned" repaired the Grey Friars' old temple, the Riddarholm Church in Stockholm, and built its present choir in the Gothic style. This church had been constructed at the end of the thirteenth century by Magnus Ladulas, who is buried there. Johan's chief interest, however, was to enlarge and beautify the Royal Palace in Stockholm. Its inner court was given an appearance more "in conformity with the time" by the construction of the Green Corridor and the large flight of steps with the baldachin and Trumpeters' Corridor. The exterior, with its smooth walls, and the proud tower Tre Kronor, retained its medieval character for a hundred years more.

On the barren Swedish soil, the art of painting grew slowly, and when we entered into direct relation with the Continent through the Vasa kings, an importation of art and artists was the only way in which artistic activity could be promoted. Thus the Dutchman, Verwilt, came during the last years of Gustavus Vasa's reign, and assisted in the interior decoration of Kalmar Castle during the reign of Eric XIV. He designed also the cartoons for the woven tapestries, which were then made in Sweden, and of which two are preserved in the National Museum. They treat themes from mythical history, one picturing the story of King Sveno and the other that of Magog. Baptista van Uther acted as court painter to Johan III.

The foundations of Jakob's Church in Stockholm were laid during the reign of Johan III, but it was not fully com- pleted until the middle of the seventeenth century. The German Church in Stockholm is one of the most inspiring in Sweden, thanks to the faithfulness with which the old artistic interior is preserved. Moreover it is surrounded by verdant trees in the midst of urban houses, and possesses beautiful wrought iron gates. The church with its network of ribbed vaulting was finished about 1640. The vaults are of the late Gothic style, but the altarpiece, the pulpit of ebony and alabaster, and the showy royal gallery with its

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SCANDINAVIAN ART

The portal of Erik von der Linde's house in Stock- holm, built at the time of the Thirty Years' War

glass walls, constructed in 1672, as well as the portal, are of the German baroque. In 1890 the German Church was extraordinarily well repaired.

Private houses in Stockholm retained the pointed gables of medieval times during the seventeenth century, as the copper engravings of Dahlbergh's Snecia antiqua show, but the ornamentation reveals a taste for an exuberant form of the baroque with the addition of a bourgeois touch. A typical example of a wealthy citizen's home in Stockholm during the days of the Thirty Years' War is the House of Erik von der Linde at 68 Vasterlanggatan. Linde, himself a native of Holland, became a Swedish nobleman, and his

A SURVEY OF SWEDISH ART 65

son Lars had the honor of being boon companion to Charles X Gustavus. The front of the mansion is adorned by a magnificent portal, where the busts of Neptune and Mer- cury indicate that the owner had acquired riches through commerce and trade. On the doorposts luscious fruits are carved — an expression of the Rubensian joy of living and love of sumptuousness that marked the age. The side which faces the Kornhamnstorg still retains, in spite of alterations, its bower (bursprdk) , a form of extension which was par- ticularly popular in Germany. In the Linde house it is supported by comical sea-gods, rendered with that Northern humor which north of the Alps so often breaks through the studied forms of the Renaissance and gives a tinge of medie- valism. That the house in its day had been costly can be concluded from the assertion of the builder that "nobody shall know what my house and my son Lasse have cost me." The Petersen House near Munkbron in Stockholm was built about 1650 upon the site where the historian Erik Gorans- son Tegel, the son of Goran Persson, had his spice shop in the early part of the century. An addition was built, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, on the side facing the sea. Often the ends of the crampirons were allowed to appear on the plastered facade and were ornamented. Decorative devices in metal were not seldom seen.

When the Swedish magnates, laden with booty, returned from the long German war, they found their poor wooden houses or their clumsy stone fortresses small and uncom- fortable, and, spurred on by foreign examples, they now commenced to build castles and mansions which corre- sponded with the growing prestige of the nobility and with the more peaceful and orderly conditions within the country. The construction of Axel Oxenstierna's mansion Tido in Vastmanland, on the shores of Lake Malaren, was begun soon after 1620, but was not completed until about 1650. Tido consists of a main building and also, like the castles of the French grandees, of lower wings, which adjoin a third low building or wall, and encircle the paved courtyard. Through a stately stone portal in the style of the late Renais-

66 SCANDINAVIAN ART

sance, ornamented by coats-of-arms, the heavy, seventeenth- century carriages rolled in and stopped in front of the big dou- ble flights of steps. As befitted the great chancellor, the walls of the castle apartments were adorned with Gobelin tapes- try and gilt leather hangings, and the doors — real treasures — were inlaid with different kinds of wood and provided with artistically made locks. Tido showed both in its exte- rior and interior that a new age had arrived. Instead of the irregular medieval structures, where the exterior signi- fied only defiant strength, there began to appear castles in which a symmetrical design and noble, well-balanced pro- portions were intended to infuse in the spectator subservient sentiments of admiration and respect.

About 1650 the palace Makalos was built in Stockholm between Kungstradgarden and Strommen. It belonged to the husband of Ebba Brahe, Jakob De la Gardie, and with its steep roof and rich sandstone ornaments, was the finest private house in the city. Later it was used as arsenal and dramatic theatre. It was destroyed by fire in 1825.

During the reign of Christina, the Dutchman, David Beck, resided a few years in Sweden. He painted the por- trait of Queen Christina, and also left us a strong and subtle picture of General Gustav Horn, which proves that he studied to good .purpose under Van Dyck. The French- man, Sebastien Bourdon, in his portrait of Christina — in simple black dress with white collar — has rendered in a distinguished manner her pale, aristocratic Vasa features with the large, greyish-blue eyes. His portrait of Chris- tina's half-brother, the Count of Vasaborg, the son of Gustavus Adolphus and Margareta Slots, shows the same merits. Christina had a profound interest in art. Her collection of paintings was considerable, and an immeas- urable aesthetic capital was removed from the land when she took away her Corregio, Titian, and Veronese canvases.

Many castles of real magnificence from the viewpoint of our conditions are pictured in Suecia antiqua et hodierna by the celebrated general and architect Erik Dahlbergh, the most superb and costly work de luxe that has ever been published in our land. Several of the castles reproduced in

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67

Drottningholm Castle near Stockholm, the central part designed by Tessin the Elder for Queen Dowager Hedvig Eleonora

good copper engravings from sketches by Dahlbergh, ren- dering even the artistically trimmed hedges of the parks and symmetrically grouped platbands, have never been built; for the Crown reduction of Charles XI compelled many an ambitious building-plan to stop on paper. Snecia antiqua appeared in 17 16.

One of the most splendid castles, filled with a super- abundance of booty from the Thirty Years' War, was Gen- eral Karl Gustav Wrangel's Skokloster with its magnificent vestibule supported by joined Ionic columns. It is situated on the fairway between Sigtuna and Uppsala, was built by a native of Stralsund, Nikodemus Tessin the Elder, and the Frenchman, Jean de la Vallee, and finished in 1679. Among the Elder Tessin's many and important buildings was Axel Oxenstierna's Palace (now the central office of the Statis- tical Bureau) near Storkyrkobrinken, and the former Riks- bank in Stockholm, reminiscent of the Roman palaces. Tessin the Elder made the first drawings for the Carolinian mortuary chapel known as Karolinska Kapellet. The other chapels in the Riddarholm Church were constructed about 1650.

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The central part of Drottningholm Castle was built, in conformity with the wishes of the art-loving Dowager Queen of the Realm, Hedvig Eleonora, by Tessin the Elder. Precht sculptured Hedvig Eleonora's magnificent golden bed-chamber. Tessin also designed Borgholm Castle on Oland. This building, begun in 1654, is now the most beautiful ruin in Sweden. In Kalmar Cathedral, dedicated 1682, Tessin the Elder furnished an example of a central church in the baroque style, although the cupola, which is essential for such a building, was never constructed.

The zealous orthodox movement which characterized the latter half of the seventeenth century in our land, not least during the severely ecclesiastical rule of Charles XI, re- sulted in a large number of church buildings. The majority of our churches then received altar decorations and pulpits in the rich and florid forms of the time; in the year 1671 Katarina Church in Stockholm was dedicated, and in 1658 the foundations were laid of the Hedvig Eleonora Church in the eastern suburb of the city. Both these, as well as the Ulrica Eleonora or Kungsholm church, which was built in the decade of 1670 and named after the pious wife of Charles XI, are central churches in the baroque style.

The most beautiful architectural creation of the century is Riddarhuset (the Hall of Knights) in Stockholm which, however, was not completed early enough to be occupied during the most brilliant period of the Swedish nobility. Two architects, emigrants from France, Simon de la Vallee (killed in 1642 by Erik Oxenstierna in a fight on the public marketplace in Stockholm) and his son, Jean de la Vallee, were the designers of this palace, which was constructed in a kind of French-Dutch baroque. The foundations were laid in 1642 from drawings by Simon de la Vallee, but Jean, who also built the beautiful palace, formerly the Town Hall, owned by First Lord of the Treasury Gustav Bonde, later altered this plan and, together with the Dutchman, Ving- boons, became the real creator of the edifice. It was not before 1680, when the supremacy of the nobility was really nearing its close, and the nobles were compelled to bend

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69

Riddaihuset (the Hall of Knights) in Stockholm, designed by Simon de la Vallee and his son, Jean de la Vallee, completed in 1680

the neck under absolutism, that the Estate took possession of the building. The red brick walls are partitioned by pilasters of sandstone, which, according to the new baroque ideas, pass through both stories. Very beautiful Corinthian capitals support a frieze, bearing an inscription which runs around the building and is composed of unusually well- formed letters. The boldly curved copper roof by Jean de la Vallee is crowned by chimneys constructed like altars or sending out clouds of smoke from bomb-like structures which rest on pedestals adorned with trophies. The roof, sup- ported by consoles and graced by decorative statues, is broken by a gable on each side. Luxuriant garlands of fruit carved in stone separate the two stories, and beneath the windows and in the segment-arched or triangular gable-bays over the tops of the windows, grin the grotesque, decorative heads so well loved by the creators of the baroque style north of the Alps. In the large assembly hall of Riddar- huset, Ehrenstrahl painted in 1674, the same year that he himself was raised to the peerage, a gigantic ceiling com- position representing The Graces in Counsel before the

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Throne of Svea ; and, now following, now deviating from these high precepts, the Swedish noblemen deliberated in this building about the welfare of Sweden until that mem- orable December day in 1865, when patriotism and gener- osity were strong enough to make them sacrifice their privileged condition of their own free will.

David Klocker, enobled under the name of Ehrenstrahl, was born in Hamburg. In his pompous portraits of the kings of the Palatine House, of his patroness Queen Hedvig Eleonora, and of the ladies and gentlemen of the Swedish nobility, we see the princes and rulers of the age known as "The Period of Greatness," a little heavy perhaps in their pomposity, very uneven in artistic presentation, but always instinct with power and boldness. Ehrenstrahl has painted half a century of Swedish greatness. He became "the father of the Swedish art of painting."

The young Klocker started — and this is almost symbolic of his art — as a chancery clerk in the negotiations connected with the Peace of Westphalia. The young German was noted for his beautiful penmanship, and there is an inner connection between the strokes and flourishes which he added to the graceful and bombastic diplomatic phrases and his own artistic temperament. He studied first in Amster- dam, came to Sweden in 1651, and the following year painted the equestrian portrait of Karl Gustav Wrangel. In the latter part of this decade he studied the contemporary baroque paintings in Italy. In 1661 he was called to Sweden and then painted in uninterrupted succession, sometimes carelessly and sometimes carefully, a countless number of portraits. Among these are Georg Stiernhielm, 1663 ; Erik Dahlberg, 1664; and the three Charleses: the talented and corpulent Charles X Gustavus and his son, the surly and duti- ful economist, Charles XI, in Roman fancy dress, with luxur- iant locks and fluttering mantles, curbing strongly built chargers; and, finally, Charles XII, though only as a child. Ehrenstrahl's Crown Prince Charles (XII) and his Brother and Sister Playing with the Lion of Gothia* shows the

*Here, one of the three original integral parts of Sweden,

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71

Crown Prince Charles (XII) and His Sister and Brother Playing

with the Lion of Gothia. Painting by Ehrenstrahl, in the National

Museum at Stockholm

princely children tumbling about most graciously with the dangerous lion, which in all humility rejoices at the honor. If we imagine his portraits placed in a seventeenth cen- tury salon, among ponderous, richly sculptured baroque cab- inets with projecting mouldings, and hung above pompous mantlepieces of imitation stone in the castle apartments, these pictures, in spite of a certain awkwardness, have a dec- orative value which transcends the purely historical. Ehren- strahl's colossal painting The Crucifixion, 1695, and The

72 SCANDINAVIAN ART

Last Judgment, 1696, are now to be found in Stockholm's Storkyrka, where he himself is buried. In Gripsholm his painting of The Well-masters in Medevi, who pour out water for the bathing guests, 1683, is preserved. With this work he introduced genre painting into Sweden, and, strange to say, animal painting also, for in his rendering of the woods and the birds he contributed something distinctly new and Swedish. It is dilettantish, to be sure, but it is exe- cuted in a fresh and almost modern way. His Self Portrait, with allegorical figures, in the National Museum, bears the following inscription in his own hand setting forth the pur- pose of his art, portraits, and allegories: "This painting is executed in the year 1691 by His Royal Majesty's Court- Intendant, David Klocker Ehrenstrahl, in his sixty-second year, and is intended to represent how, out of love for the art of painting, he seeks to exalt with his fantasy, the im- mortal honor of the higher authorities."

Ill

THE CAROLINIAN AGE THE ROYAL PALACE

NIKODEMUS TESSIN the Younger was the son of Nikodemus Tessin the Elder, mentioned in the preceding chapter. It was prophetic of the royal favor he was destined to enjoy all his life that he was carried to the baptismal font by Queen Maria Eleonora, the widow of Gustavus Adolphus. He learned sketching from his father, but maintained that the direct impulse to enter the field of architecture came to him at seventeen from the Queen Dowager of the Realm, Hedvig Eleonora, who made her influence felt so often and so happily on behalf of Swe- dish art. The young man arrived in Rome at the age of nine- teen, eager to learn, and was received with great kindness by Queen Christina, through whom he gained admittance to the artist most eminent in Rome at the time, Cavaliere Bernini. Concerning the latter Tessin testified that "with a special disposition and care he gave me all the informa- tion I could desire, both in the choice of the best works and in the censuring of the designs for my studies which I made myself."

He returned to Stockholm, and upon the death of his father in 1681, was appointed architect of the Royal Palace. It thus fell to his lot to continue the construction of the Drottningholm country palace and its extensive park. In order to carry on studies for the rebuilding of the old and venerable Royal Palace in Stockholm, which Charles XI had planned, Tessin went abroad again in 1687, this time in company with Burchardt Precht, a gifted German sculptor in wood who had settled in Sweden.

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Nikodemus Tes- sin the Younger designed the pom- pous carved and gilded Kings' Pews which were exe- cuted in wood by P r e c h t, and in- stalled, 1684, in the Storkyrka. Tessin also made the drawings for a pulpit, sculptured by Precht, which was presented to Uppsala Cathedral by Hedvig Ele- onora in the year of the battle of Poltava. Through these works of art in particular, baro- que sculpture, as practised by Tes- sin and Precht, came to exert a strong influence upon the adorn- ment of our Swed- ish churches.

Concerning the two travelers' visit to Versailles, Tes- sin writes, that Louis XIV "let the honor come to me that all waters in the whole Versailles have played for me." Europe's greatest landscape gardener, Le Notre, conducted him "from one pleasure-grove to another," and Tessin declares,

The pulpit in Uppsala Cathedral, carved

by Burchardt Precht after drawings by

Tessin the Younger

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he "can never fully describe their magnificence." The two Versailles artists, Charles Lebrun and Berain, the latter Tessin's ideal in the field of ornamentation, also interested him keenly. It is certain that what he learned there was of the greatest moment, both in the construction of the Palace and the designing of the parks which Tessin afterwards laid out in Sweden. In Rome, where he proceeded from Paris, Tessin again imbibed among palaces and baroque churches that disposition for bigness which was to characterize his greatest work, the Royal Palace, and immediately after his return to his native country he began, 1688, the drawings for the north facade. Before undertaking the construction of the Palace in earnest, however, he erected several buildings of great value to Swedish architecture, for example, Gustavi- anum in Uppsala and Steninge in Uppland. This beautiful castle, which was built at the close of the seventeenth cen- tury, became a model for many of the Swedish mansions erected during the eighteenth century and was called "a villa in the noblest sense of the term." Its dimensions were moderate, but the architectonic form all through was per- fect. He fitted out his own house, now the Governor- General's Palace in Stockholm, with rare taste and beauty, and the magnificent salons were decorated in the pompous and elegant style of Louis XIV, often with features borrowed from the above-mentioned Berain. The Tessin palace was presented by King Gustavus III to the city of Stockholm to serve perpetually as the official dwelling of the governor- general. Of special interest is the construction of the court- yard, where the background consists of a loggia of con- tracted perspective. When we see this, we are reminded of the tendency to stage effects which constituted a character- istic trait of the baroque. Tessin had a European reputa- tion, and his plans for the rebuilding of the Louvre, which were shown to Louis XIV in 1705, were the source of admir- ation in France. We may be glad, however, that his pro- posal, like that of Bernini, was not accepted, and that Les- cot's Louvre was allowed to stand.

The old royal palace, where Gustavus Vasa and Gustavus

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Adolphus had lived, had fallen more and more into decay during the seventeenth century. As noted above, Nikodemus Tessin the Younger was commissioned by Charles XI to build a new one, and the north wing was already completed, when a fire broke out in May, 1697, at the very time when the body of Charles XI was lying in state. Tessin then made new drawings and immediately began the erection of the new palace. Its massive walls had already risen to consid- erable height when the building had to be discontinued; for money and people were pouring out of the land because of the war, while Charles XII led Sweden nearer and nearer toward the brink of destruction.

In 1728, the year that Nikodemus Tessin the Younger died, the work was again taken up, now directed by his son, Karl Gustav, whose contribution to Swedish art was to be of great import. Later the work was directed by Karl Harleman, who was particularly active in behalf of the orna- mentation; but during this time the progress of construction suffered from lack of funds due to the unwise and poorly planned offensive war against Russia in 174 1. At last, in December, 1754, Adolphus Frederick and his gifted queen could move into the new palace, although the northwest wing was not completed until 1760. Lejonbacken (so named after the bronze lions modeled by the Frenchman Foucquet in Stockholm and set up in 1704) was completely laid out in 1830, and the Palace had then cost 10,500,000 rix-dollars, an enormous sum when we consider the hard times in which it had been procured and the current value of the money.

The Royal Palace is one of the most beautiful buildings in the whole world. In simple, lofty grandeur the noble square of the palace rises above the city. The enormous quadrangle has four lower wings. The most imposing part is the fagade opposite Norrbro, which is 217 meters long. It is divided into three stories, with an entresol above the lowest. The upper part of the windows is supported by consoles, as was customary in the Roman neo-Renaissance. A small balcony rests on the cornices of a stately Doric por- tal. Two genii of fame are enthroned above, the door to

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The Royal Palace at Stockholm, designed by Nikodemus Tessin the

Younger

this balcony, an adornment which gives life to the stern sur- faces. The roof slants inward toward the courtyard, and the facades are crowned by a balustrade; hence the outer roof, as in the Italian models, is not visible. On the side facing Logarden, which is perhaps the noblest in its virile beauty, Corinthian pilasters, resting upon a lower story in rustic-work, run through the two upper stories, a feature of the baroque style which is duplicated in the gigantic half- columns of the central part of the south facade, forming a kind of triumphal arch at the main entrance of the palace. This side is ornamented, besides, with reliefs and four beau- tiful bronze groups, representing the abduction of women, modeled by Bouchardon. The west fagade is adorned with huge caryatids and medallions of Swedish kings. On this side lies the outer ballium with its two wings ; the south, the Governor's wing; the north, that of the Palace Guard, where Gustavus III, on an August day in 1772, persuaded the offi- cers to take part in the revolution.

The imposing main stairway leads up from the west vault, illuminated by tasteful bronze lanterns. These are sup- jported by fat cupids, modeled by the Frenchman, Jacques- Philippe Bouchardon, according to the prevailing French

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The Great Gallery in the Royal Palace at Stockholm

method of sculpture, and instinct with life and grace. The grand staircase is flanked by Ionic and Corinthian columns and pilasters. Nor are the effective perspectives, so fre- quent in baroque architecture, missing. Kronberg's paint- ings, executed in the decade of 1890, are fitted into the ceiling. The galleries and halls of the palace are furnished in the heavy elegance of the baroque style, with paintings on the ceilings, richly designed groups in plaster of Paris rest- ing on the mouldings, and with heavy gilding. Other rooms, with their decorations often carved in masterly fashion out of unpainted wood, their shell ornaments, and lattice designs, indicate the rococo which in Sweden, however, had hardly time to become established, before the so-called Gustavian style (Louis Seize) with its returning classic features and its white and gold was generally adopted. The Palace pos- sesses a collection of uncommonly beautiful Gobelin tapes- tries, which, paneled in the walls and depicting in subdued colors French gallant episodes, formed a rich background for the festivals at Gustavus's court.

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Rococo door in the Queen's Red Salon in the Royal Palace, by Adrien

Masreliez

The palace courtyard with its huge gate-frames of rustic- work conveys a strong impression of simple greatness. The

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south portion of the palace is occupied by the hall of state and the Slottskyrka, and beautiful flights of steps lead up to both of these from the vault underneath. The Slottskyrka, with its vault adorned by Taraval's ceiling painting, its pom- pous pulpit, and its theatrical but effective altar-piece, where Christ in the Garden appears between rent temple-facades in high plaster-relief by Larcheveque, is excellently adapted to the magnificent building of which it is a part. This Palace was built with Herculean efforts, worthy the Sweden of Charles XII; it is as big as the bold dreams in Sweden's golden age of power, when its foundations were laid; its construction was continued with the most tenacious persever- ance, when the soap-bubble of external greatness burst; and finally it was beautified with exquisite art, when Sweden began, for the first time, to occupy an important place in the science and culture of Europe.

The foundations of the so-called Karolinska Kapellet at Riddarholm Church, which became the final resting-place of the Palatine Charleses, were laid according to drawings by the elder Tessin, but the structure as a whole is the fruit of Nikodemus Tessin the Younger's studies in Italy. It is our country's most notable edifice in the baroque style. Smooth sandstone columns with Doric capitals embrace the semi- circular windows, and an attic with round windows rests upon a triglyphical architrave. The chapel is built of sand- stone and is covered by a copper-clad cupola. This is sur- mounted by a golden crown, supported by a pedestal of ex- ceptionally tasteful form. Vases and memorial tablets, re- liefs and martial emblems are found in great numbers, and upon a cloud reproduced in stone is seen a genius holding a crown. The chapel contains the Sarcophagus of Charles XII, where the club and lion's skin indicate the Herculean work of his life. This sarcophagus was fashioned in Amsterdam in 1735 after drawings by Nikodemus Tessin the Younger. An attempt was made in 19 16 to replace it by a new one — a grotesque idea. The building was com- pleted in 1743 by Karl Harleman.

An architectural school grew up, fostered in the concep-

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r

Karolinska Kapellet, the Carolinian mortuary chapel in Riddarholm Church in Stockholm, designed by Tessin the Elder, but not completed until 1743

tions of Tessin; the indigenous crafts received guidance from foreign artists; and, encouraged by the court, cabinet-mak-

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A yellow soup tureen from the Rorstrand factory in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Now in the National Museum

ing, manufacture of glazed ware and porcelain, and other industrial arts, began to flourish. In 1726 the Rorstrand faience factory was established, but the product did not become satisfactory until 1758, when the shops of Marie- berg entered into competition. The yellow, round faience soup tureen, which is reproduced here, comes from the fac- tories of Rorstrand. The faience of both Marieberg and Rorstrand was much admired at the beginning of the twen- tieth century by those interested in art. Not only its dec- orative form, but also the somewhat coarser and more virile character of its surface, proved attractive as compared with other rococo porcelain. The Frenchman, Guillaume Thomas Raphael Taraval the Elder, who had been called to decorate the Royal Palace with ceiling paintings and lintels, through his instruction in drawing to young Swedish art students, gave the impulse for the birth of the Academy of Arts, 1735.

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Chest with veneer of beech, birch, and maple, bronze fixtures, and

marble plate. Made by Georg Haupt, about 1779. In Nordiska

Museet at Stockholm

During the whole of the eighteenth century the Royal Palace was the center of Swedish art.

In the gloomy years of war in the beginning of the eighteenth century, Swedish culture, especially art, declined, and it was a long time before the country recovered from the effects. The Carolinian age was satisfied with crudely exe- cuted paintings that often revealed the hand of the artisan. It was a Hamburg artist, David von Krafft, summoned to Sweden by his maternal uncle Ehrenstrahl, who fixed on can- vas, in austere, dark portraits, the features of the inflexible warrior-king, both as a young, rather gawky, fighter, and as an older man with bald crown and hair whitened by adversities.

Among the artists and portrait-painters who were active in Sweden and painted the celebrated men of the first part of

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the eighteenth century was Martin Meytens the Elder, born at the Hague. His straightforward and dignified portrait of the author of Atlantica, Olof Rudbeck the Younger, is a good type of a gentleman from Sweden's Period of Great- ness. His son, Martin van Meytens the Younger, was born in Stockholm but spent most of his time abroad; in France and Austria he painted members of the very highest society. Besides his elegant Portrait of the Artist in the Academy of Arts, we have in Sweden from his hand the stately group The Grill Family.

Georg Desmarees was also a pupil of the Elder Meytens. Among his portraits may be mentioned those of Nikodemus Tessin the Younger and Arvid Horn in a rather pompous style, and the more austere and realistic picture of the wife of Admiral Appelbom, painted in 1723 and now in the National Museum. Mikael Dahl chose his field of opera- tion in England. Dahl was a pupil of Ehrenstrahl, but dur- ing his residence in England he came under the influence of the Van Dyck portraits which he saw there. A softer ele- gance is noticeable in the almost feminine portrait of

The pleasure palace China, near Stockholm, designed by Karl Fredrik Adelcrantz

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Charles XII — not painted from life, however, — which is now in the National Museum. This influence is still more apparent in Dahl's paintings of women, a good example

being the portrait, now pre- served in Gripsholm, of the young Queen Anne of Eng- land, pale, with dark, waving locks and a loosely fitting, low-necked silk dress.

During the middle of the eighteenth century, the honest portrait-painter Olof Arenius, a pupil of David von Krafft, was active in Sweden. The last type of the somewhat bom- bastic German-Italian baroque style was Georg Engelhard Schroder. As portrait paint- er of the court, he put on canvas the ruddy, swollen features of Frederick I. The fashion painter of the period 1 740-1 760 was Johan Henrik Scheffel, among whose numer- ous portraits those of Linne and of the poetess Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht de- serve special mention.

Karl Fredrik Adelcrantz is perhaps the most eminent architect during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The "patriotic goddesses of song" to whom Gustavus III dedicated his favorite creation, the Opera, had their habi- tation erected by Adelcrantz. Arvfurstens Palats is the Tor- stensson palace rebuilt by Erik Palmstedt — who had just finished the Exchange — and gives a picture of how the old Opera House looked. But the old auditorium, whose walls

The tower of the Storkyrka in Stockholm, rebuilt by Johan Eberhard Carlberg

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were decorated by Adelcrantz with exquisite taste in white and gold, and which in their day had vibrated both with the "report of Anckarstrom's pistol"* and the silver tones of Jenny Lind, is gone forever. Adelcrantz made the draw- ings for Norrbro, of which the foundation-stone was laid in 1787, and which was completed in 1806. Its mighty arches, constructed of granite blocks, emphasize by their massive beauty the thinness and poverty of our modern iron bridges. The Adolphus Frederick Church in Stock- holm is built after plans by Adelcrantz like an equibranchi- ated Grecian cross with cupola, but the small dimensions and especially the consequent low position of the windows weaken the impression which the visitor experiences in sim- ilar Italian churches. In the luxuriant verdure of Drottning- holm park gleams the small, red-painted pleasure palace, China, its rococo forms intermingled with Chinese orna- ments. At the time when it was built (1763) Chinese por- celain, then called East Indian, was in great vogue, and so was China's industrial art in general, for it harmonized in several respects with the super-refined, sumptuous taste of the rococo. The coquettish pleasure palace, a plaything for adults, was also a creation of Adelcrantz.

The Storkyrka in Stockholm, which had been rebuilt by Johan Eberhard .Carlberg, was completed in 1743. The tower is one of the most tasteful and beautiful in the church architecture of the period.

*A reference to the murder of Gustav III by Anackarstrom, 1792.

IV

FRENCH AND ENGLISH INFLUENCES IN THE GUSTAVIAN AGE

IT was inevitable that Swedish art, during the reigns of Frederick I, Adolphus Frederick, and Gustavus III, should be stamped with French characteristics. The temper of the age, the confirmed French sympathies of Louise Ulrica and Gustavus III, as well as the influence of Nikodemus Tessin the Younger's son, the discriminating art patron, Karl Gustav Tessin, sufficiently explain this move- ment. Nevertheless, the close of the eighteenth century gave expression to many of the most distinctive traits of the Swedish temperament: festive exuberance, a taste for display and pomp and, underneath it all, a lightheartedness tinged with sadness such as we find in Bellman's songs. More important than the external influence of patrons and princes was the fact that during all this time artists directed their attention toward Paris, availing themselves of the opportunity to use the excellent French teachers and to acquire that firm technique which was the backbone of con- temporaneous French art.

The first Swedish painter to become known in Paris was Gustav Lundberg, whose pastel paintings — a genuinely rococo form of art — won the admiration of his time. The portrait of a lady, which is reproduced here, is unfinished but, nevertheless, charming. It is that of Mile. Hanck, later the wife of Assessor Schroder, who "because of her beauty was received by Her Majesty Louise Ulrica, who provided for her education." This lovely lady, painted just before 1750, has often been depicted by Lundberg's crayons, but

87

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Portrait of the wife of Assessor Schroder, unfinished pastel by Gustav Lundberg, in the Academy of Art at Stockholm

never more beautifully than in this portrait. The technique of the pastel brings out the softness of a coquettish woman's face, glancing roguishly from beneath the broad-brimmed straw hat. It is reported that Lundberg was wont to fall in love with his model, and that he then painted his very best, and if so, we may assume from this portrait quite a tender passion. Lundberg was accepted in Paris as early

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as the third decade of the century and studied with the famous Venetian woman pastel-painter Rosalba Carriera, who is excellently represented in our National Museum, notably by the pastel portrait of the Swedish-born Roman senator, Nils Bielke, in typical rococo colors, blue and silver.

Lundberg was in vogue at the court, where the young Swede had the opportunity to initiate the exiled Stanislaus Leczinski, father-in-law of Louis XV, into pastel-painting. His reputation was established when Karl Gustav Tessin, during the years 1 739-1 742, guarded the interests of Sweden at the French court and of Swedish art among artists and art dealers. Tessin procured for Lundberg a place in the French Academy of Painting, from the members of which the Count had ordered several portraits of his beautiful young relative, Froken Charlotte Fredrika Sparre, then a resident in Paris. Karl Gustav Tessin himself had had his portrait painted in excellent manner by Lundberg; the pic- ture is now in the possession of Baron Bo Leijonhufvud. Lundberg has also painted a fine portrait of his colleague Boucher.

During his sojourn in Paris, Tessin purchased pictures by almost all prominent contemporary French painters, espe- cially by his favorite Boucher, but also by Lancret, Chardin, and others. This Swedish aristocrat, with his inherited taste and his intense interest in art, through these purchases of French and, not less, Dutch masterpieces, laid the founda- tion for the collection of paintings, engravings, and sketches in the National Museum.

Still more illustrious than the position of Lundberg was that occupied in the metropolis by Alexander Roslin. From the middle of the eighteenth century, Roslin was the painter of high society in Paris, and he amassed a large fortune by his portraits of the Parisian aristocracy. From the year 1756 dates the charming potrait of Baroness Neubourg- Cromiere, so fresh and typical of the time, with the black half-mask in one hand and the fan in the other, the dainty figure dressed in a light silk gown. Many Roslin connois- seurs consider this painting the artist's masterpiece. "Qui

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Baroness Neubourg-Cromiere, by Alexander Roslin. Owned by Alfred Berg, Stockholm

a figure de satin doit etre peint par Roslin," was the com- ment in France. Such a silky smooth face he has painted in the superb portrait of Himself with his Wife. The beautiful Suzanne, who was a French artist in pastels, is busy finishing a portrait. Her peach-colored complexion is enhanced by the light-green silk of her dress, and the fea- tures are refined by a touch of gentle dreaminess. He has

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Portrait of the Artist and His wife, Painting in Pastel, by Alexander Roslin. At Fano in Uppland

immortalized himself, behind her, smiling with that stereo- typed smile of a man of the world which was so character- istic of the rococo and of his whole art.

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Roslin was famous for his great ability in reproducing silk and satin and for creating a general impression of elegance. For his defective reproduction of character he was violently attacked by Diderot, who in the sixties wrote brilliant criti- cisms on the Salons, the annual art exhibitions. During a visit to Russia in 1775, Roslin had the opportunity to paint the Empress Catherine and the great men of Russia. The portrait of Catherine was considered a good likeness, but the noble lady herself maintained that it made her look like "a Swedish kitchen maid." His admirable head of the elderly Linne, in the Academy of Sciences, seems to chal- lenge to a certain extent the censorious remarks of Diderot, for the features of the venerable old man beam with kind- ness, and his clear eyes, which had been permitted to "peep into God's secret council-chamber," sparkle with that bright outlook on life which was one of the most charming traits of the eighteenth century. As an excellent example of drap- ery painting the splendid Portrait of Gustavus III at Grips- holm occupies a high place. The portrait emphasizes the weak, almost effeminate quality of the King's figure. Gus- tavus III is dressed in a bluish-violet costume worked in silver and wears an ermine mantle. Roslin has often painted Gustavus and his brothers, and has, in a masterly way, reproduced the old acetous visage of Louise Ulrica, at the time when the Queen, on unfriendly terms with her son, was designated by the insolent members of the court as the lady "beyond the fence." The lustrous side of the famous Swede's art appears in the picture of Gustavus III and his brothers, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 177 1. This is a brilliantly painted picture of the three ele- gant princes, who in their gold-embroidered coats, their breasts gleaming with stars and decorations, discuss the plan of a campaign, while with obliging condescension they turn their smiling faces toward the spectators. C. R. Lamm in Nasby has the largest number of Roslin paintings in any private collection.

Nils Lafrensen the Younger spent the time from 1760- 1790, with the exception of a few years, in Paris where he

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Three Women Musicians, gouache by Nils Lafrensen the Younger. In the National Museum at Stockholm

was known under the name of Lavreince. His art also was to an exceptional degree Parisian. He had in common with Fragonard a wide range of subjects, though he was far from

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equalling him either in power to express the storms of pas- sion or in the brilliant brush work in which this master of rococo was preeminent. It was in salon pictures that Lafren- sen excelled. He was most at home in the beautiful Louis seize rooms, where the windows went down to the floor, so that one might see more of nature which Rousseau had just taught people to admire, where the gobelin covered chairs and sofas with oval backs and straight legs were occupied by charming countesses and baronesses, who dogmatically discussed chemistry and physics, the rights of man, and not least, the philosophy of love. Among these pictures from the world of salons, which were often reproduced in copper engravings after paintings by Lafrensen, the following well- known engravings deserve special mention: L'assemblee au salon, a representation of that pleasant social life which flourished during l'ancien regime, and, Qu'en dit monsieur l'abbe? where the advice of a gallant abbot is sought in a question of taste concerning dress, this important matter being decided, according to the custom of the time, at the morning toilet of the young lady.

Lafrensen preferred to paint in gouache. One of Lafren- sen's most beautiful gouache paintings is that in the National Museum, representing Three Women Musicians, who sit in a room of the Gustavian style decorated with light green draperies. His women have a feminine grace, and the small scale common in his pictures gives a stamp of in- timacy to these amiable sheperdesses of the salon, who laughingly tell one another their secrets, compare their- charms, and revel in the tortures of their admirers. Lafren- sen did not return home to settle in Sweden until 1791. He then occupied himself for the most part with miniature painting. Next to Hall, mentioned below, he is our fore- most miniature painter. Among his portraits the gouache of Gustavus III in a Swedish costume of red and black is best known.

In miniature painting a Swede, Peter Adolf Hall, won, during the seventies and eighties, the greatest fame, and was called in Paris, where he made his home, the "Van Dyck of

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Portrait of Fru Hall with Sister and Daughter. Miniature signed "hall, 1776." In the Wallace Collection in London

miniature." His miniatures of contemporaries, painted on ebony, gained general approbation because of his firm and light touch. In the National Museum are preserved his portraits of Gustavus Ill's friend the Countess d'Egmont, with refined features wasted by illness; his broadly painted Portrait of Himself; and the excellent picture of Sergei in Swedish costume. The miniature of Fru Hall with Sister and Daughter was purchased for 19,000 francs for that unique collection of eighteenth century art, the Wallace Col- lection in London.

Miniature art was very popular during the whole of the eighteenth century. It appealed to the prevailing taste for the pretty, and at the beginning of the century was much used on the snuff-boxes which were so fashionable at the time. During the latter half of the same century, the period of tender declarations of love and friendship, the collecting of miniature portraits became a mania.

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The man who may be said to have been the real creator of the Gustavian style was the architect, Jean Erik Rehn, who, after studies in France, adapted the style of Louis XVI to our conditions, and exerted an excellent influence through his designs for Haupt's furniture and Rorstrand's porcelain. His fine taste is especially noticeable in Louise Ulrica's library at Drottningholm, which was fitted up by him.

Among the many excellent artisans in Sweden during the eighteenth century, the royal court cabinet-maker, the car- penter-artist Georg Haupt occupies the first place. He was born and died in Stockholm, but received his education in France and England. Bureaus, writing-tables, and secre- taries, executed by Haupt in the Gustavian style and inlaid with wreaths, flowers, musical instruments, or cupids, aroused the greatest admiration during his life-time, and are now in constant demand by Swedish collectors. His masterpiece de luxe was the gigantic cabinet for minerals which was presented by Gustavus III to the Prince of Conde and is now preserved in the castle of Chantilly. With res- pect to taste and technical perfection of room-fittings and furniture, it is doubtful whether any age can compete with the artificers of the seventies and the eighties of the eight- eenth century. Even when compared with the larger coun- tries possessed of old culture, Sweden occupies a very high place in this field.

Karl Gustav Pilo, in his unfinished but magnificently beau- tiful Coronation of Gustavus III, now in the National Museum, has executed a masterpiece in the art of color. The painting — three meters high and five and a half meters long — is extraordinarily well composed. The sunlight plays upon the gilded pews carved after drawings by Tessin the Younger, and is refracted in the white silk and violet velvet, giving a vibrating life to the great ceremony in the Stor- kyrka. It is taken at the moment when Archbishop Beronius and Lord High Chancellor Count Horn hold the crown over the head of Gustavus. Pilo lived for a long time in Den- mark, where, about 1770, he was for two years the director of the Academy of Art. His unusually fascinating portrait

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The Coronation of Gustavus III, unfinished painting by Karl Gustav Pilo. In the National Museum at Stockholm

of the doll-like form of Sofia Magdalena, which stands out in a soft clair-obscure with something of an aristocratic fowl in her eyes and in the position of her head, testifies to his great gift as a colorist.

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Sofia Magdalena, by Karl Gustav Pilo. In the collection of Count von Rosen

Per Krafft the Eldei-j born in Arboga, studied under Ros- lin in Paris and became afterward court painter in Warsaw. After he had returned to Sweden, in 1768, he executed some excellent portraits in clear, pleasantly harmonizing colors, among which may be mentioned that of Emanuel Sweden-

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The Mechanic Daniel af Thunberg, by Lorens Pasch the Younger, in the National Museum at Stockholm

borg and the bright-tinted picture of Bellman with the Lute, in the Gripsholm collection.

The portrait painter Lorens Pasch the Younger was the most eminent of the well known Pasch family of artists. He was born and died in Stockholm. Lorens Pasch the Younger became a pupil of Pilo in Copenhagen and of Boucher in Paris. A pastel of Gustavus III, a faithful picture of the elderly pastel painter Gustav Lundberg, both in the Acad-

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emy of Arts, and a good portrait of Louise Ulrica in Rosersberg are among the best works of this industrious artist. A rare firmness of character distinguishes the por- trait Pasch made of the Mechanic Daniel of Thunberg. Something of peasant ancestry and something of middle- class uprightness and plainness is brought out in the picture of this workman who had ennobled himself solely through his own labor. The green ribbon of a Knight Commander of the Order of Vasa stands out against the brown coat.

Danae and the Shower of Gold, by Adolf Ulrik Wertmuller. In the National Museum at Stockholm

Adolf Ulrik Wertmuller was born in Stockholm of an esteemed bourgeois family. He studied at the Academy of Arts, and in the same year that Gustavus III was crowned, set out for extensive travels abroad. He reaped greatest benefit from his sojourn in Paris, where he enjoyed the kind- ness of his relative Roslin, and himself acquired a good repu- tation as a portrait painter. It was at the request of Gusta- vus III that Marie Antoinette had a group picture of her-

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self and her children painted by him. In 1786 she presented the portrait to Gustavus III. With national pride it is signed "Wertmuller suedois." In the last decade of the century Wertmuller set out for North America, where he had the opportunity to paint the great Washington. After a visit to his native home, he returned to the United States and put on exhibition, in 1800, in Philadelphia, the unusually charm- ing picture of Danae and the Shower of Gold, which was executed in the new classical tendency of the time. An American patron of art has presented the work to the National Museum in Stockholm. Wertmuller married in America and died there in 18 12 upon an estate which he had bought in Delaware, where Sweden possessed a colony in the seventeenth century.

Per Horberg from Smaland, a self-educated artist who studied a little in the eighties at the Academy of Arts in Stockholm, attempting to imitate the academic painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, executed in a some- what naive and stiff-handed fashion, a large number of altar paintings, now preserved in the country churches of Oster- gotland and Smaland.

Chardin's scenes from bourgeois life find a counterpart in Sweden in the productions of Per Hillestrom the Elder. His art is of varying value, now dry costume pictures of an exclusively historical interest, now again well executed small interiors from the better middle class homes in Stockholm : a mother instructing her children, old women telling for- tunes in coffee grounds, servant girls testing eggs against the light, or fair friends giving each other their confidences. Most frequently a touch of old-fashioned honesty, of joy and comfort of home, are found in Hillestrom's paintings. The preference of the artist for a moderate scale befitting his themes is another good characteristic of his pictures.

A landscape painter who brought the new English concep- tion of nature to Sweden was a nephew of the above-men- tioned Haupt, a native of Stockholm, Elias Martin. In adherence to the English school of painting, with its light effects, coloristic foundation, and deeper feeling for nature,

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At the Embroidery Frame, by Per Hillestrom. Fraenckel in Stockholm

Owned by Froken

Martin, who spent a long time in England, painted several truly poetical landscapes, often of astonishing freshness and with something of Gainsborough's clair-obscure. As a por- trait painter, he appears to very good advantage in the pic- ture of Bellman. Martin has designed the vignettes of the latter's Temple of Bacchus and has, besides, engraved the sketches for the well known book Journey in Italy, by the art-philosopher and admiral-in-chief, Karl August Ehrens- vard, in which the author sets forth, in brief, oracular terms,

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Landscape with Waterfall, by Elias Martin. In the National Museum at Stockholm

his one-sided and neo-Classic but often ingenious opinions about art, nature, and people. Both Martin and Ehrensvard were friends of Sergei. For Augustin Ehrensvard, the cre- ator of Sveaborg, Elias Martin had painted views of this fortress, and had also acted as instructor to his son, Karl August. His brother, the copper engraver, Johan Fredrik Martin, is known for his Views of Stockholm in large out- line etchings with handpainted water-colors of excellent artistic effect.

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Portrait of the Artist's Father, by Karl Fredrik von Breda. National Museum at Stockholm

In the

Karl Fredrik von Breda went to England in 1787 for the purpose of study and there enjoyed the guidance of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He painted the portrait of Sir Joshua as an admission-piece into the Swedish Academy of Arts. Breda, who is one of the country's very best portrait paint- ers, had acquired in England a warm and extremely effective treatment of colors. After his return, in 1796, the aristoc-

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racy, who valued the noble bearing he gave to his portraits, sought the services of the young artist. Besides his powerful technique, his broad brush, and sense of the picturesque, he brought from England that feeling for nature which char- acterized the last years of the eighteenth century. His por- trait of the actress Teresa Vannoni, painted with warmth and breadth, reveals, through dress and conception, that the times of Gustavus were past; now people gave themselves up to nature-worship in the parks, where at the altars erected to friendship they consecrated tender sighs to the moon and stars. Breda has produced the most substantial and valuable in Swedish painting of the first half of the nineteenth century. His Portrait of My Father, painted 1797, with Spanish cane and the tall black hat that came originally from the Anglo-Saxon lands, indicates the invasion of romanticism, and produces an almost ghost-like effect with its pale face and its figure, wrapped in a wide, black, Spanish cloak against the background of a dark, stormy sky. From an artistic viewpoint, it is an important work. During his later period his portraits often received an unpleasantly reddish tint.

During the decade of 1790, Per Krafft the Younger, the son of Per Krafft the Elder, painted his best portraits, es- pecially that of the architect Deprez, now in the Academy of Arts. He received guidance from the great David. Krafft adopted a more and more inflexible method of paint- ing during the last part of his extraordinarily long artistic career.

SERGEL

THE first and greatest name in the plastic art of Sweden is Johan Tobias Sergei. Born in Stockholm of German parents — his father was a gold-embroiderer from Jena — and educated in Sweden by French teachers, he received his deepest art-impressions later in Rome from the old Greek sculptures, which were the object of so much admiration and not less of learned study, especially in Germany, during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Sergei's indi- viduality, however, was so strong that he was able to fuse these different impressions in his art. He succeeded in breathing warmth and life into his work, and was inspired by the antique in a more profound way than was generally the case with his contemporaries. For this reason his figures do not become stif[ and cold imitations. Over the marble lies the rosy shimmer of the days of Gustavus, supple strength in the male forms and softness in the female, widely different from the smoothness of the Italian Canova or the magnificent but cold reconstructions of Thorvaldsen.

During the years of his apprenticeship under the French sculptor, Pierre Hubert Larcheveque, he assisted the latter with the large altar-relief in plaster of Paris, Christ in the Garden, for the Slottskyrka. Sergei received, besides, the opportunity to assist in the rough work on the statue of Gustavus Vasa, unveiled 1774, and that of Gustavus Adol- phus, unveiled 1796, neither very successful. In these statues, Larcheveque was not on a par with the excellent contem- porary French sculptors, but it must be admitted that, in the eighteenth century, with its defective historical sense, it was

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107

almost impossible to obtain a picture of "old king Gosta" that was national and true to history. Larcheveque's great- est distinction consists in having been the teacher of Sergei, and, in 1758, when but a youth of eighteen, Sergei was allowed to accompany his instructor to Paris. There, with- out a doubt, he received strong impressions from Falconet and Pigalle, the great French rococo sculptors, whose grace and sensuous elegance were bound to exert an influence upon the precocious young Swede. In 1767 Sergei went to Rome and remained there until 1778. There the greatness of antiquity was revealed to him partly by means of the previ- ously mentioned scholarly currents in art.

The Faun, statuette in marble by Johan Tobias Sergei. In the National Museum at Stockholm

In the year 1770 The Reclining Faun was finished. The figure attracted general attention by its joyousness and stamp of energy. Notwithstanding its small size — not quite a meter in length — it produces a very striking effect through its animation and its pagan, exuberant joy of life. There are

108 SCANDINAVIAN ART

rare unity and buoyancy in this splendid work of art. In accordance with the custom of Bernini and the Italian-French sculptors, the marble is polished. A short time later Sergei modeled the hero-type Diomedes and began work on a group, Cupid and Psyche, originally ordered by Madame du Barry but acquired by Gustavus III, when the death of Louis XV prevented her from purchasing the statue. The theme is taken from the old significant myth about Cupid who is obliged to leave Psyche after she has sought, out of curiosity, to ascertain his origin and name. Psyche's trem- bling before the inevitable and Cupid's majestic repellent gesture are combined in plastic harmony. Kellgren wrote:

Behold, alas! in desperation,

Before the god of love she lies,

In pardon-seeking supplication

For slighting her belov'd's advice. The magnificent group Mars and Venus was also modeled in Rome, though carved in marble at a much later date. It represents the goddess of beauty engaged in the battle about Troy, as she sinks fainting into the arms of the god of war. The contrast between masculine strength and feminine soft- ness, the motif that was so popular with the neo-Renais- sance and the rococo, appears here to excellent advantage. Sergei returned home from Rome by way of Paris, where, as an example of his art, he modeled his statue of Otryades who, dying on the battlefield, inscribes upon his shield the tidings of victory. This dramatic representation created a lively sensation in the Academy where it was exhibited. Among those present on this occasion was the famous sculp- tor Pigalle, as also Pajou, Houdon, Chardin, and Roslin. This work gained for Sergei admittance into the Academy. Sergei returned to Sweden in 1778. On the way he vis- ited London, where he met Reynolds. The classical treas- ures that had been taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin were not put on exhibition until 18 12; consequently Sergei could not see them. He had no opportunity to see either these works of sculpture or, for that matter, many of the best Greek statues of the fifth and fourth centuries which,

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Mars and Venus, marble group by Sergei. Owned by Count A. F. Wachtraeister

according to the belief of our time, represent the culmina- tion of classic art. It was the weaker neo-antique that Sergei and his contemporaries tried to imitate. Fortunately his art contains much of the good French traditions.

In 1780 the King ordered the Venus which bears the pretty rococo head of Countess Ulla von Hopken, nee von Fersen. In this figure Sergei has immortalized one of Kell- gren's "three graces." For the statue of Gustavus Adol- phus, Sergei modeled during the decade of 1780 the group

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Axel Oxenstierna Dictating to History the Deeds of the Hero, a group which has only in our day been set up in its right place at the base of the statue. The decorative genii who bore aloft the monogram of Gustavus above the cur- tain of the Opera, and have now been removed to the same place in the new Opera House, also date from this period. In another building, the Adolphus Frederick Church, also the creation of Adelcrantz, Sergei executed a monumental piece of work in moulded lead, namely the Memorial to the Philosopher Rene Descartes, who died in Stockholm in 1650. The theme of a genius lifting the veil of ignorance from the globe and letting the torch of enlightenment flame over the sphere was certain to make a strong appeal to Sergei, and indeed this monument glows with life and possesses splendid decorative qualities. Sergei executed also the altar-piece for the same church, where The Resurrection of Christ is repre- sented in high relief in plaster of Paris. Christ, a beard- less youth of Grecian type, ascends toward heaven with out- spread arms, surrounded by angels. The form-language of the figures is classical, but the same is true of the first sculp- ture of the Christian church. Yet the beautiful gigantic relief is not Christian according to the conceptions of our time.

In 1 783-1 784 Sergei had the opportunity to accompany Gustavus III upon his travels in Italy. In Rome Sergei was royal councillor in matters of taste, and among other things expressed his most passionate delight over the recently dis- covered statue of the sleeping Endymion, which the king later ordered to be purchased. Two paintings in the French section of the National Museum are a reminder of Gustavus' visit in Rome, one of them by Desprez representing Gusta- vus III Attending Christmas Matins in St. Peter's Cathe- dral, 1783. Vapors of incense float about Bernini's bronze baldachin, as Pius VI raises the holy vessel where the miracle of transsubstantiation takes place to the music of the bells. The other painting is by Gagneraux. It shows the King and his entourage, among them Sergei, inspecting the won- derful collection of sculpture in the Vatican, escorted by the

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Portrait of the Countess Charlotta Fredrika von

Fersen, nee Sparre. Marble bust by Sergei.

Owned by Baron Hopken

Pope. In Rome Sergei met the young Canova and Angelika Kauffmann.

After his return home Sergei was employed chiefly in the field of portraits. His splendid portrait busts and portrait medallions of Sweden's most eminent men were highly val- ued, and the admiration aroused by his noble art contributed to elevate the standing of artists in the land. Particular mention may be made of his realistic, strongly characterized, bust of the Countess Charlotta Fredrika von Fersen, who as a girl — Froken Sparre — had been with her relative Karl Gustav Tessin in Paris, where several French artists had reproduced her piquant features. Now, in 1787, she is rep- resented as an aged grande dame, still so pleasing and beau-

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Gustavus III, portrait statue in bronze by Sergei. On Skeppsbron, Stockholm

tiful beneath the becoming widow's veil that she fully deserves to be a mother to those young ladies who enrap- tured the Stockholm of 1780, the "graces" Ulla von Hopken and Countess Lowenhielm.

Sergei several times perpetuated the figure of Gustavus III, and succeeded admirably — not least in "the living Gus- taviad in bronze" on the Skeppsbro at Stockholm's Quay, giving artistic unity of conception to the complex nature of this King, who bore, "the laurels of the theatre in powdered hair strangely combined with the real, true ones." It is a Swedification of Apollo di Belvedere, ordered by the citi- zens of Stockholm in 1790 and set up in 1802 on the spot near Svensksund where the King landed as victor. Among

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the portrait medallions arc the genial countenance of Kell- gren and the figure of Bellman, the wine-god of the North, with vine leaves in his hair. In his pen sketches Sergei has shown us the more intimate sides of the poet Bellman, in his morning-after mood, and he has also made many draw- ings of himself and his noted friends, the admirer of the antique Karl August Ehrensvard, the Dane Abildgaard, and many others who frequented the artist's hospitable home. In general, his sketches and washes, at times gro- tesque, but always executed with a marvelous sense of the picturesque, constitute a very valuable complement to his productions as a sculptor. Sergei died on the 26th of Feb- ruary, 1 8 14. Active at a time when pedantic imitation of the antique began to be considered as the highest art, he succeeded, thanks to his strong, healthy, and sensuous nature, in developing his personality so that he stands out as the foremost artist our country has possessed, and occupies an uncontested place of rank in the European art of his time.

VI

THE TRANSITION PERIOD

UNDER the influence of neo-Classic ideas, Swedish architecture, toward the end of the eighteenth cen- tury, began to be dominated by antique forms in the exterior of the buildings as well as in the interior dec- orations. Meanwhile the materials employed became poorer, while the power of invention lessened.

Olof Tempelman, a native of Ostergotland, built, in 1790, the Chancery near Mynttorget, with its sober Doric temple fagade. For Gustavus III, who lived occasionally in a little idyllic wooden house at Haga near Brunnsviken, Tempel- man erected the so-called King's Pavilion, which was com- pleted in 1790. The French-born Jean-Louis Desprez, who was to have built the giant palace Haga for Gustavus III in historical classic style, got no further than the foundation, which was laid in 1786. In the same period Uppsala Con- servatory was begun after drawings by Desprez in the Doric style. Desprez was one of Sweden's best painters of stage decorations; especially beautiful were his decora- tions for the opera Gustavus Vasa which was performed in 1786. Desprez has painted also the magnificently com- posed pictures Gustavus III Attending Christmas Matins in St. Peter's Cathedral (seepage no) — the artist had made the acquaintance of the King on his Italian journey — and the Naval Battle of Hogland with cheering marines amidst huge fluttering sails. The latter has been preserved in Rosersberg Castle. Louis Adrien Masreliez, son of Adrien Masreliez, born in Paris, painter, art-theorist, and decor- ator, has decorated a number of rooms in the King's Pavil-

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115

Wall decoration in "Gustavus Ill's Divan" Adrien Masreliez

at Haga , by Louis

ion at Haga with some excellent, neo-antique ornamental friezes which call to mind Raphael or the loggias of Pompeii. Though the architecture of the first years of the nine- teenth century is marked by a certain aridness and frigidity,

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Salon in Rosendal Palace at Djurgarden, built by Fredrik Blom.

Furniture in the Empire style. Frieze, The Coming of the Asas, by

Hjalmar Morner

and though it suffers from a certain meagreness especially with respect to material, nevertheless it does not lack dis- tinction. Fredrik Blom built, during the decade of 1820, the beautiful old Animal House near Lilla Nygatan in Stock- holm, the Rosendal Summer Palace in Djurgarden park, and the splendidly located Skeppsholm Church which has a grandeur of form often lacking in the Swedish houses of worship in the later nineteenth century. Karl Kristofer Gjorwell was a son of the well-known author who has been called "the patriarch of learned labors." In the Queen's Pavilion at Haga and in the Military Hospital on Kungs- holmen, especially in the latter, which was completed in 1834, he has attained that severe beauty which was the ideal of the empire style.

Among Sergei's pupils none equalled the master, although Johan Niklas Bystrom has executed some good work, and

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117

Statue of the actress Emilie Hogquist, by

Johan Niklas Bystrom. In the Dramatic

Theatre at Stockholm

especially his group The Sleeping Juno with the Child Her- cules at her Breast has a touch of greatness that is doubly refreshing in view of the prevailing taste for the banal and the insipidly sweet. There is often something weak and impersonal, however, in his female figures, and it cannot be

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Thor, marble statue by Bengt Erland Fogelberg. National Museum, Stockholm

At the

denied that Swedish sculpture about 1850, even though not compared with great names like Rude, Barye, or Schadow, had about it something reminiscent of big, chalky caramels, the sugar being predominant in the work of Bystrom and the chalk in that of Fogelberg. While he lived in Rome, Bystrom's happy, hospitable home was a center of Swedish artists. The well known Bust of Bellman in Djurgarden, unveiled in 1829, is from Bystrom's hand. He has made a delightful little statue which is undoubtedly a representa-

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tion of Emilie Hogquist in the role of Aventurine in The Polka. It was in 1845 tnat tne fascinating and idolized actress appeared in this play — the last in which she took part — and enraptured the audience by her grace in the polka, a dance which was entirely new at the time. She died the following year in Italy.

Bengt Erland Fogelberg is noteworthy chiefly for his efforts to find a plastic form for the gods of Norse myth- ology. The question of employing themes from Norse an- tiquity in sculpture was zealously discussed at the begin- ning of the century. Geijer wrote, in 18 17, a treatise "Concerning the Employment of the Norse Myths in Fine Arts" in which he said that these themes ought to be made use of, but warned against formlessness and exaggeration. He shows himself surprisingly far-sighted in his censure of the prevailing unnatural imitation of the antique, not least in the domain of painting, where the life element, color, was ignored, and the figures resembled "painted stone images." In the exhibition arranged by the Gothic Society in 18 18, Fogelberg exhibited models for statues of Odin, Thor, and Freyr, the latter being exchanged afterwards for Balder. The statues were later cut in marble, and now stand on the staircase in the National Museum. A somewhat theatrical pose spoils the impression of Balder, and this is still more true of Odin. Fogelberg has succeeded best with Thor; he is a type of a Northern god, full of power and with conscious pride in his bearing and yet with something of a peasant's good humor about him. The statue of Gustavus Adolphus in Gothenburg and Bremen, of Charles XIV Johan and Birger Jarl in Stockholm, all three unveiled in 1854, are well known works of Fogelberg. His art has a certain dry- ness, and does not attract or charm like that of Sergei's, but the new types which he succeeded, after much hard labor, in giving form have been of importance in Swedish art.

Erik Gustav Gothe's rather tame art never rose to any high artistic level. The dull statue of Charles XII in Kungs- tradgarden in Stockholm, unveiled in 1821, and the perfor- ated spire of the Riddarholm Church, for which he made

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SCANDINAVIAN ART

The Ruined Castle, by Karl Johan Fahlcrantz. In the collection of Thorsten Laurin

the drawings, are his best known productions. The latter was erected after' the beautiful old spire had burned down.

In general, it may be said that the first decades of the century are characterized by a prevalence of dilettantism and extremely low standards in art. After the splendor of the Gustavian age, Sweden had a period of self-satisfied and Philistine mediocrity in the field of painting. All the more absurd, therefore, seem the bombastic eulogies of the Academy of Arts, when it condemns or comments in high- sounding phrases the feeble art products of the time.

In Alexander Laureus, who was born in Abo and died in Rome, we notice an agreeable change from the usual poorly depicted allegories and the still more tedious "historical" paintings of the time. In The Dance, executed in 1814, one of Laureus's best pictures, the artist experiments with the

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effects of candle light, a problem in illumination with which he was much engrossed. The prevalent conditions at the ball seem to be very simple, unpretentious, and even naive, but the fresh-colored beauties in their simple white flutter- ing dresses are enjoying it thoroughly, while the partners in their tight-fitting garments hesitate between "Astrild" and the goblet, as the punch-glass was so grandiloquently called in those days. The cold, tame allegories and the often wooden portraits of the highly esteemed Stockholm artist Fredrik Westin and his colored and sweetish nude figures, bedaubed with "Professor Westin's human paint," aroused the enthusiasm of his contemporaries, a fact which does not speak very well for their artistic judgment.

Karl Johan Fahlcrantz, born in Dalecarlia, was influ- enced by the melancholy of Ruisdael and the evening sun- light of Claude Lorrain, and became the painter of the romantic landscape. A typical picture is The Ruined Castle at the Foot of a Mountain. Warm, brown and violet tones and a kind of universally musical atmosphere are characteristics of this artist, who was so much admired in his own time. Apropos of Fahlcrantz's paintings, Geijer wrote the following profound words: "Painting is the art of developing the inner light or of stealing the light of all things, not only the external, but the light which beams from within. All good painting is soul painting."

The first half of the nineteenth century was a "harmless" period for art in our land. Among the few architects of any importance was Axel Nystrom the Elder. He revised and carried out Tessin's plans for Lejonbacken — the north passage to the Royal Palace, so called from its two bronze lions — and attained a great effect by the use of excellent material, smooth-cut granite, as well as by firm, dignified lines. The Bazar on Norrbro, razed when the Riksdag building was erected, was by Axel Nystrom.

Interest in art and the desire to purchase it were at this time negligible among the general public, and the few artists to be found lived by themselves in Rome as academic fellows, industriously wielding the brush on pictures repre-

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senting Italian beggars and robbers, romantic opera-figures placed in a dazzling evening light. The paintings are char- acterized in general by a mixture of aridness, gaudy color- ing, and minuteness of detail, with little individualization. Naturally, there were in the whole group of those who made their living by painting some men of talent who felt oppressed by the small town stagnation in the art life of Rome, where in reality only sculpture flourished, and where Thorvaldsen and Bystrom were hospitable hosts for the young Scandinavian painters. There lived in the twenties the witty dilettante Captain Count Hjalmar Morner whose Stockholm Sketches, it is true, cannot be compared in an artistic sense with those of Daumier and Gavarni, but are, nevertheless, full of amusing and typical features. They picture gentlemen who in thick overcoats drink their warm toddies in the simple Stockholm taverns of 1830, or quiet tea circles with musical entertainment, or lively ferry-women with strong arms and fiery temperaments. His paintings — among them the frieze The Coming of the iEsir in the Rosendal Palace — possess less interest. Considerably more prominent as an artist was Morner's faithful friend and comrade Sodermark.

Olof Johan Sodermark was, during the forties and fifties, the best portrait painter in Sweden. When he was invited to Rome by Bystrom, he had already distinguished himself as a soldier and received the medal of honor for bravery in the war with Norway in 18 14 — several painters of that period were military men — and now aroused general atten- tion by his carefully painted and delicately characterized portraits. A combination of neo-Classic purity of form and romantic sentimentality is found in a portrait, typical of the time, of Bystrom' s friend Karolina Bygler in greyish lavender silk dress with puffed sleeves, outlined against the yellow satin of the sofa. Sodermark perhaps excelled most in his portraits of men. The great men and women of Sweden had their pictures painted by him. Among these may be mentioned especially the portrait of Berzelius, the conservative politician von Hartmansdorff, Jenny Lind as

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Portrait of Karolina Bygler, by Olof Johan Sodermark. In the National Museum at Stockholm

Norma, and, finally, Fredrika Bremer — one of the last por- traits that Sodermark painted.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, Paris was not so popular among the artists as before. A Swedish painter, however, Per Gabriel Wickenberg, made a great success there. He died young, but managed, through the study of nature and of the old Dutch landscapes, to educate himself so that he became an artist of real merit, even though he could not compete in originality with the French

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Moonlight after Rain, by Per Gabriel Wickenberg. In the National Museum at Stockholm

masters, Corot and others, who were not held in high regard at the time. In his winter motifs and in his Moonlight after Rain, in the National Museum, he avoids the theatrical features which spoil the greater part of the contemporaneous landscape painting, and his pictures belong to the truest nature descriptions- that Swedish art had produced up to that time.

Gustaf Vilhelm Palm was the most esteemed landscape painter among the Swedes who lived in Rome. His Italian views have something harsh and glaring, but are animated by his feeling for picturesque architecture. The reminis- cences of Rome in 1840 became determinative of his long artistic career. His landscapes from the Malaren valley display a tone which reminds one of the Campagna and Lake Albano. He was most successful in his Stockholm view The Riddarholm Canal at the Middle of the Century with Palmstedt's beautiful stone bridge over the canal — a bridge, constructed in 1784 and razed in 1867 to make room for that monster of bad taste which has disfigured the place for half a century.

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The Nix and /Egir's Daughters, by Nils Johan Blommer. In the National Museum at Stockholm

The animal painter Karl Wahlbom made an important contribution to Swedish figure-painting. Wahlbom was initiated into the old Norse sagas by his friend, the gymnast and poet Ling, and drew the illustrations for Ling's poem The iEsir. In his popular painting, The Battle of Liitzen, 1855, he shows his great ability to represent the different movements of horses. His art marks a step forward in technique. Nils Johan Blommer gave form to the themes of the Norse folksong, and in his romantic painting The Nix and iEgir's Daughters, 1850, in the National Museum, he created a work full of poetic feeling, which — attractive even to us — appealed in the highest degree to the tempera- ment of the age. On the other hand, his well known Freja Drawn by Cats, 1852, in the National Museum, is rather too suggestive of a caramel-painting.

The Varmlander Uno Troili was the most prominent of Sodermark's pupils, but an exaggerated distrust of his own ability prevented him from taking the place he might have

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SCANDINAVIAN ART

Fru Anne-Marie Hallstrom, by Uno Troili, in the National Museum at Stockholm

filled. He studied in Italy, but learned most, perhaps, in Paris. Troili's portraits have something firm and honest in their execution, and the best of them show also an exqui- site taste in the choice of color. A colored background throws into relief his pictures of imperious squires and their wives. During the fifties and sixties he was Sweden's best portrait painter. His brush knew how to bring out the monumental as well as the soulful. Among his works are

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Secretary Myhrman, the finely characterized portrait of Fru Anne-Marie Hallstrom (the mother of Professor I. Hall- strom), with violet cap-strings against a black dress, painted with the consummate skill which Troili lavished on his draperies, and, finally, the charming picture of Fru Mont- gomery-Cederhielm, executed in 1861.

VII

THE DUSSELDORF INFLUENCE. THE HISTORICAL PAINTERS

THE decade following 1850 received its impress from the painters who sought their education in Diisseldorf. In this quiet little town on the Rhine there had been formed a school of painters who tried to employ motifs from contemporaneous life, and, like the seventeenth century Dutch painters in genre, to depict peasant festivals, life in country parsonages, weddings, and funerals. But in these experiments there was always something of a stage effect, of an altogether too obvious humor, while artistic consid- eration was forced into the background by features designed to catch the public eye with cheap effects. By its choice of new subjects, however, and by pointing to the sur- rounding reality^ the school became of great consequence, and it would be an injustice to forget the reawakening of public interest in art which, despite all, was due to the "Diisseldorfians." The Norwegian-born Swedish lieutenant Karl D'Uncker with his Pawnshop, his Gambling-hall in Wiesbaden, and his Third Class Waiting Room has given us characteristic types and personages of the fifties and sixties, more valuable, to be sure, in an historical than in a profoundly artistic way, but even from the latter viewpoint deserving interest. Bengt Nordenberg exemplifies the peasant genre of the school by his excellent Tithe Meeting in Skane, a tableau vivant characteristic of the whole move- ment. Ferdinand Fagerlin, who was born in Stockholm in 1825 and died in Diisseldorf in 1907, surpasses the other members of the school in the artistic qualities of his ex-

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Jealousy, by Ferdinand Fagerlin. In the National Museum at Stock- holm

tremely detailed portrayals of the Dutch fishermen in their home-life, which he represents with feeling and a technically meritorious method. His beautiful and thoroughly well executed Jealousy, in which a young Dutch sailor pays court to a charming blonde, would perhaps have gained something by the absence of the second, sad-hearted girl, who gives the picture, according to the taste of our day, a touch of the unpleasantly anecdotical; but with respect to technique and color effect Fagerlin's production indicates an important advance. His art, however, is quite naturally more German than Swedish. August Jernberg, who was active during the sixties and seventies, shows himself very sensitive to color and for that reason more nearly on a par with the old Dutch models. His street scenes from Diisseldorf and more particularly his highly flavored and excellently painted fruit- pieces and kitchen interiors have that richness and strength of color which are often lacking among the Diisseldorfians; therefore, his pictures are valued more than others from

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SCANDINAVIAN ART

The Borrower, by August Jernberg. In the Gothenburg Museum

this school. The genre painting The Borrower with a motif from west Germany is a little masterpiece. A landscape painter of marked individuality, though in some ways typical of the fifties, at once superficial and possessed of power that had a touch of genius, was a native of Ostergot- land, Marcus Larson, who showed in his painting some of the traits that Johan Nybom exhibited in poetry. He be-

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Landscape with Waterfall, by Marcus Larson. In the National Museum at Stockholm

gan as a saddle-maker's apprentice. Then after years of study in the Academy of Arts, travels at sea, and wanderings in Norway, he began to paint pictures strongly influenced by the Diisseldorf artists whom he studied. But he was perhaps still more deeply affected in Paris by the old Dutch land- scapes, especially those of Ruisdael, which he saw in the Louvre. Larson infused his love for the wildness and melancholy of nature into paintings where we can see the waves surging, the lighthouse twinkling, and the waterfall hurling its foam between the tall trunks of the pine trees, while broken clouds scud across the sky. A distinct flavor of the the?trical is undeniable. The best of his pictures, however, bear evidence of great talent. His striving for effect, together with an unbridled and inharmonious element in his nature, prevented him, in spite of great promise, from being thoroughly successful. Through his own fault, he was

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finally shipwrecked, both in his art and in his life. He died in London in 1864.

During the reign of Charles XV, there was considerable interest in Swedish art. The king, who was himself a painter, encouraged and supported artists with a generous hand. In his activity as a patron of art, the king received much aid from his friend and teacher of painting, Johan Kristofer Boklund, a native of Skane. Boklund, who had made profound studies in Munich and Paris, had, as pro- fessor at the Academy, the very best influence upon his pupils, by whom he was especially liked because of his help- fulness. His real field as a painter lay in the historical genre — minor picturesque episodes in historical dress, such as soldiers at their drinking bouts, marauders, and similar things. Thanks to a rare capacity for work and a love of art, his activity has been of very great importance, even outside of his own artistic production from his position as intendant of the National Museum and director of the Academy of Arts.

The brother-in-law and nephew of Nystrom, Fredrik Vilhelm Scholander, of Stockholm, soon became the leading artist personality in architecture. The historical sense had been more and more aroused in Europe; romanticism turned people's thoughts to the Middle Ages, and a strong interest in the Gothic style of building was manifested in almost all the countries of Europe. In Sweden, the "his- torical styles" came into use principally through the pupils of Scholander. As a teacher at the Academy of Arts he exercised a strong influence. All buildings at this time, even those of a monumental character — -with the exception of the National Museum — were finished in fine plaster coatings, with decorations in plaster of Paris, in such a way as to simulate stone. Such a facade looks dead beside one finished in natural stone — although a well done plaster fagade, which does not pretend to be anything else than what it is, has both its raison d'etre and its beauty. Scholander's Syna- gogue in Stockholm, completed in 1870, with Oriental motifs deserves the approbation with which it was received.

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It was the intention at first that he should erect the foremost Swedish memorial building, the National Museum, but in 1849 the designs of the German architect Friedrich August Stiiler were accepted in preference. Stuler was a pupil of Schinkel and was born in Thuringia. In accordance with his plans the stately structure was erected in the Renaissance style and covered with grey and reddish limestone. The decoration of the interior, however, was directed by Scho- lander. The Museum was dedicated at the time of the Exposition in Stockholm, 1866. Scholander was also of great importance in Swedish art as a painter, musician, poet, and draughtsman. His remarkable feeling for the orna- mental, a field in which his imagination is inexhaustible, is especially well brought out in his excellent sketches illus- trating Fjolner's Saga, written by himself and published in 1867, as well as in other saga sketches with architectural and decorative motifs.

About the middle of the century, Swedish sculpture was represented by Qvarnstrom and Molin. It was a barren period in art, and the monuments and statues produced in considerable numbers during this time did not attain the highest level. In general, they are characterized by a cer- tain correct tediousness and a considerable portion of pose and conventionality. Tegner in Lund, Berzelius in Stock- holm, and Engelbrekt in Orebro by Carl Gustaf Qvarnstrom were more the expression of the literary and historical interest of the time than of the artistic, and the same may be said of the somewhat theatrical Charles XII in Stockholm, unveiled 1868, by Johan Peter Molin. On the other hand, the bronze group The Belt-duellists, exhibited in the Paris Salon, 1859, is by virtue of its dramatic quality and excellent characterization a work of sculpture well fitted to adorn the beautiful spot near the National Museum in Stockholm. It is a truly original group with not only a Scandinavian theme but a Scandinavian conception. Molin's Fountain which was exhibited in plaster at the Exposition in Stock- holm, 1866, and was later set up in Kungstradgarden, is of great decorative beauty. Even though the different

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Indian Dancer, drawn by Egron Lundgren at a Festival in Lucknow, 1859. Owned by Froken Elsa Nordenfalk, Lovsta

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groups of mermaids and water deities that mark the site of Stockholm between Lake Malaren and the sea are not in themselves perfect, nevertheless the whole work of art, with its bold elevation and mighty sweep of form, makes a fine impression, especially when seen against a blue summer sky with the water spurting over the cochleated edge. It is a fine impulse that leads men to adorn public places with an artistically formed fountain, which in the midst of the din and noise reminds us of the peace and harmony of beauty, itself a treasure of beauty which every citizen may proudly call his own.

Egron Lundgren, though born in Stockholm, spent most of his time in Italy, Spain, and England, and has recorded his artistic impressions in a number of brilliant letters. Quite naturally, he found the atmosphere in Sweden cold and depressing, but he continued to feel a warm interest in the artistic development of his native country. His greatest success was in water-colors, and his pretty and artistic small sketches and water-colors often reveal new points of view. His style, both in drawing and painting, is sometimes sug- gestive of Gavarni. There seems to exist a family likeness among all his coquettish Spanish women, but their easy grace won them a well deserved popularity with the public and the critics. Egron Lundgren was really a rococo painter born too late. He utilized color to the utmost, and it was through color that he was able to conjure up new, fresh aspects of the worn out Italian motifs. During the Indian Rebellion of 1858, Lundgren accompanied the British army and painted some of his best things in oils as well as in water-colors, one of them being The Spy in the National Museum.

The foremost representative of landscape painting was a native of Stockholm, Edvard Bergh. He, also, studied in Diisseldorf, but developed a genuinely Swedish conception. He preferred . to depict on large canvases landscapes of middle Sweden, smiling- scenes, where tall birches are re- flected in inland lakes, or where the cattle graze in the pasture, and the sunlight filters in through the light green

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A Gate in the Birch Woods, by Edvard Bergh

foliage. Bergh's art was easy to understand and was well liked. Its national stamp gives it an added value for us.

Johan Fredrik Hockert belongs to the painters whose art does not easily grow old. We are often unjust toward the products of a few decades ago. Living in the midst of a reaction against the exaggerations or faults of which they were guilty, we are prone to undervalue their merits. But

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A Girl from Rattvik, by Johan Fredrik Hockert. In the Fiirstenberg collection, Gothenburg

when it comes to Hockert, we see with pleasure that even during this period, which was so barren of great art, there were artists who painted with life and spirit, and were able to create something permanent and of real interest to poster- ity. Such was the work of Hockert. His Lapland Chapel, in the museum at Lille, The Interior of a Laplander's Hut, in the National Museum, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1857, and his Girl from Rattvik, in the Fiirstenberg collec- tion, do not appeal either to the risible faculties or the tear glands, like many contemporaneous pictures of folk life; they picture life quite simply, but in a personal way and with warmth and color. Hockert studied in Munich, which soon forced Diisseldorf into the shade, and surpassed his

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teachers in proficiency, especially after he had developed his technique during a sojourn in Paris in 185 1. There he aroused attention and had the opportunity of selling to French galleries. His art rises to greatness in his last pro- duction, The Palace Fire 1697, one of the best paintings in the Swedish section of the National Museum. High among the flames we see dimly the casket of Charles XI, and in the foreground the white-haired "Mother of the Charleses" tottering along, supported by her grandchildren. There is spirit and life in the thrilling action, and the picture is painted with an unusual bravura, but it was chiefly through his gift for coloration that he attained his prominent place in the history of Swedish art.

The tendency toward the Old Norse, which already existed in sculpture, and was further strengthened by newv and zealous archeological studies, now received champions in the field of painting also. Loki and Sigyn and Thor's Combat with the Giants by Marten Eskil Winge do not now seem so imposing as they are colossal in size, but they are, nevertheless, remarkable illustrations of what the sixties meant by national art, and Winge's energy and enthusiasm in the execution of the Northern themes was admirable.

The man who found the artistic form for this interest in Old Norse was August Malmstrom. His father was a peas- ant carpenter near Medevi in Ostergotland, who with great and touching sacrifice gave his son an education as an artist. Malmstrom studied at the Academy of Arts in Stockholm, in Diisseldorf, and in Paris. Both in himself and in his art there was much of a substantial and genuine Swedish quality. He was the right man to give form to the old sagas. In 1859 he painted in Paris a picture which is thoroughly Scan- dinavian both in color and character, Ingeborg Receives the Tidings of Hjalmar's Death; and about the same time Malmstrom started on a theme with which he was to strug- gle, in an artistic sense, his whole life. This was The Battle of Bravalla, which is presented in two different productions, both of them excellent. The earlier and more romantic belongs to the Stockholm Municipal Building; the other in

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Ingeborg Receives the Tidings of Hjalmar's Death, by August Malmstrom. In the National Museum at Stockholm

Nordiska Museet is more realistic and more Northern in its character. Through his pithy sketches for Fridthjof's Saga and the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, Malmstrom has contributed in a still higher degree than by his painting to give our people a true and full conception of our forefathers during the Viking Age. ' He has also sketched episodes from the Finnish War of 1808-1809, with an austere but appeal-

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ing faithfulness to nature. His series of oils painted in grey tones illustrating Runeberg's The Grave in Perrho, which were presented by the artist to the Technical School in Stock- holm, occupy the first rank among these war pictures. There is another side to Malmstrom, however, an element of tenderness which is sometimes in the best sense child-like. His Dance of the Elves, exhibited in 1866, belongs to the happiest incarnations of folk poetry, while his chubby Country Children show the humorous bent in his character. During the nineties, Malmstrom pictured in a number of excellent water-colors that combination of meagreness and grace in the Swedish landscape which is so dear to our hearts.

Poplars, by Alfred Wahlberg. Owned by V. Biinsow

The ideas of the Fontainebleau School were put into practice in Sweden by Alfred Wahlberg, born in Stockholm in 1843. He studied first in Diisseldorf, and among the results of his studies there we find the magnificent composi- tion, Landscape in Kolmarden, 1865, in the National Museum. From the French painters in Paris he learned

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how to look at nature in a simpler and more profound way, and hereby a new element, difficult to define, entered into the Swedish landscape art — the spiritual quality known as st'dm- nhig. Moonlight scenes, groups of trees, and views had been painted before; now the artists strove to paint the soul of the landscape and to fix on the canvas a transient moment so that it would produce in the spectators a concentrated sense of evening repose, of the threatening power of a storm, of the frosty clearness of an autumn day, or the torturing melancholy of the rain. A slight theatrical aspect, a me- mento of the Diisseldorf period, still remains in his large Moonlight Landscape with a river, in the National Mu- seum, although the French School already asserts itself. The sureness and elegance of Wahlberg's art have contrib- uted much to open the eyes of the public to a truer and more intimate landscape painting. An unusually good example of Wahlberg's lyrical conception of nature is a picture full of sentiment known as Poplars.

Gustav Rydberg, himself a native of Malmo, painted the lowlands of Skane and the beautiful country around Ringsjon with a loving and discriminating touch. Olof Arborelius of Orsa painted the luxuriant verdure of Dalecarlia and the mining district Bergslagen with a freshness of handling which increased with the years. Reinhold Norstedt pic- tured the landscape of his native Sodermanland, its estates and castles with parks, avenues, and pastures, often bathed in the moonlight and suffused with a soft melancholy. A Mill near Spanga, The Eriksberg Castle and A Summer Landscape in Sodermanland, in the Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, belong to this phase of his artistic talent. He has also painted Stockholm, however, once in a picture of gigantic dimen- sions, A Summer Night near Stockholm Stream, the property of the Stockholm Municipal Building, where the mighty outlines of the Royal Palace may be seen in the background. In his canvas The Norstedt Printing Office on a Winter Afternoon, he has revealed that subtle beauty which a twilight hour may lend even business buildings, iron bridges, and street cars. Norstedt' s art is like its parent.

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A Mill Near Spanga, by Reinhold Norstedt.

Laurin

Owned by Carl G.

Everything wild and passionate is absent. He did not like anything unfinished, and shunned what was rough as much as what was sickly sweet. His pictures were small in size, conceived in an artistic and well-rounded style, and painted with an ardent, manly feeling, often with spirit, in spite of the slow and careful execution of details.

During a residence of several years in France, Norstedt became the one who appropriated to the fullest and deepest degree the ideals of the Fontainebleau school an^ trans- planted them to Sweden. Not only the view of nature but also the purity of mind and dread of humbug, strife, and turmoil, that were so characteristic of Corot, Rousseau, and Millet, shine forth from the life and work of Norstedt, and the same is true of the personal delicacy of feeling which is found in these French artists, and also of their musical timbre. As an etcher of landscapes Norstedt is our fore- most representative thus far.

It is noted above that Munich began to take the first place as a center of German art. Diisseldorf was outdone. The historical painter Piloty in Munich was a popular teacher,

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during the sixties and seventies, of that historical figure- painting which was so much in vogue at the time, a field in which the Frenchman Delaroche, in the thirties and forties, and the Belgian Gallait, in the thirties, had won a European reputation. Whereas the Diisseldorf paintings resembled, in many respects, scenes from comedies, the products of the last named artists call to mind well staged tragedies. There is something vacuous and ostentatious in this art which had its authorization as an opposition to the colorless art at the beginning of the century. It was this hollow method of treatment of the historical themes which made "historical" paintings suspicious; for the main point is how a subject is handled, whether it be a still life or a battle. At all events, we understand our age better than any other. Historical reconstruction will always be false, and our time paints an overcoat better than an armor, just as the Middle Ages painted an armor better than a toga. We tire most quickly of archaizing art, i. e., that painting, which, using a stale method borrowed from the old masters, seeks with a feigned naivete to obtain the same touching effect which the latter unconsciously gave their paintings.

Georg von Rosen received his education from Piloty in Munich and even more from H. Leys in Belgium, who imi- tated the archaic in Holbein's style. Rosen soon reached a finished artistic development. He was born in Paris but came to Sweden at the early age of five, and Paris, strangely enough, was to be the art center with which he had least in common. It might almost be said that Rosen in his art realized just what the Munich school tried in vain to express. The historical and universally human have in him been fused into a unity. The sound, aristocratic art of Velazquez had an influence in giving him his thorough technique. Rosen's production has not been abundant, but it is of sterling quality. King Eric's anguish of soul is reproduced in mas- terly fashion in the large painting Eric XIV, Karin Mans- daughter, and Goran Persson. Eric's scarlet garments shine with royal splendor, and we see him wavering between hate and love. On this canvas, signed 1871, monumental

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Eric XIV, Karin Mansdaughter, and Goran Persson, by Georg von Rosen. In the National Museum at Stockholm

grandeur and exquisite color are united into a whole, and the characters live their own lives woven of hatred, terror, and love, but play no part for the spectator. The same dramatic suspense js found in The Prodigal Son, in the National Museum. Upon the ground, outside of a medieval country home, with glowing evening skies in the background, lies the ragged, despairing son on his knees before his mother, who is just coming out upon the steps. In 1881, a few years before The Prodigal Son, Karin Mansdaughter Visiting Eric in Prison was put on exhibition in the Art Museum in Copenhagen. The light from the tiny prison window falls upon Karin's face. With beautiful eyes she looks up to her gloomy husband. It is a great moment, but full of bitter pain.

Rosen's etchings and sketches with themes from the six- teenth century show an unusual ability to transport himself to past ages. Among these are the copper etching The Chris- tening and the masterly glass etching Ture Jonsson Returns

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from the National Assembly in Vasteras. The artist is perhaps most successful of all in portrait painting, a field of art in which our time, with its sense of the individual, is much interested. Very impressive and spirited is his Portrait of

Portrait of Self, by Georg von Rosen. In the Uffizi Gallery at

Florence

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Himself in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The portrait of his father and that of Pontus Wikner are both among the best productions of contemporary portrait painting. The former pictures the old count and railroad builder in his decorative fur coat, his eyes beaming with friendliness and intelligence; and the latter, painted in 1896, several years after Wikner's death, interprets the hunted, restlessly searching expression of a countenance furrowed by thinking and suffering of the soul. In his official portraits also Rosen shows himself very eminent. That of Director General Troilius with its mixture of ponderousness and kindliness is a good example. The Portrait of Charles XV, with the outstretched hand, is excellently characterized, as is also his Oscar II, a picture which has a high value from a coloristic viewpoint as well. Unfortunately, however, the latter has been completely spoiled by subsequent retouching by the artist. The monumental picture of Governor Baron af Ugglas should be especially mentioned, as well as the strong, slightly humorous head of A Farmer from, Sodermanland, in the National Museum.

Rosen's best known canvas from the closing period of the century was The Resurrection of Queen Dagmar, painted in response to an order from Denmark and hung in Freder- iksborg. Here the artist depicts the gentle queen of Valde- mar the Victorious, who has died during his absence and who comes to life for a moment, through a miracle, to bid her husband farewell. The painting was completed in 1899. For decades the artist strove to picture the inexorableness of Fate in an allegorical painting called Sphinx. In the figure, a lion with a woman's head, he succeeded in producing some- thing of the very scent of a beast of prey, while the superbly painted face, with the beautiful, hard mouth, the delicate nose, which seems to be smelling blood, and the terror-strik- ing look of madness and pain, bear testimony to his great art and psychological insight.

Julius Kronberg, born in Karlskrona, in 1850, also ex- perienced the influence from Munich. By a thorough study of the technique of the masters, he attained sureness in

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The Nymph of the Chase and Fauns, by Julius Kronberg. In the National Museum at Stockholm

means of expression and discovered a brilliant, luscious coloring. He made his reputation by The Nymph of the Chase and Fauns, purchased in 1875 for the National

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Museum. It shows his art from its best side. Here we meet an unexpected boldness and a vivid color that had not been seen before. The nymph in her white beauty against the warm, yellow silk, the play of sunbeams on the tropical foliage and, not least, the merrily grinning fauns, full of the love of life, called to mind the joyous coloring of the seven- teenth century. The following year Spring was painted, representing a beautiful young woman who flies through the air on a stork, surrounded by flower-strewing cupids. In Saul and David the kingly form of Saul is one of the artist's best figures, while the decoration of the royal hall shows his exquisite taste and wide knowledge in the domain of industrial art. Kronberg's greatest works, however, are the ceiling pieces above the main stairway of the Royal Palace. Of the three allegorical paintings, the first pictures Svea surrounded by the symbolical figures of Commerce, Agriculture, and Industry; the second portrays the rose- colored form of Aurora ; while the third represents The Ascension of the Soul. In a series of paintings with subjects from Biblical history, Kronberg completed the decorations of the cupola in the Church of Adolphus Frederick in Stock- holm. The ceiling panels in the auditorium of the Dramatic Theatre, representing Orpheus and the Muses, is distin- guished by a magnificent composition, even though, like several of his works, it suffers from a banal sweetishness both in color and form. His portrait of the blind Professor Hamberg and the strongly characterized portrayal of the energetic aged profile of Consul Ekman show his many- sidedness. Like Franz von Lenbach in Germany, Julius Kronberg has made a large number of admirable copies from Venetian and Flemish painters.

Within the domain of historical painting, which was more and more neglected, Nils Forsberg, of Skane, after pro- found studies in France, won distinction with his gigantic A Hero's Death, a motif from the Franco-Russian War, and was awarded a medal of the first class at the Paris Salon in 1888. The largest picture that Forsberg has painted up to this time appeared at the International Exposition in

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Paris in 1900. It represents Gustavus Adolphus before the Battle of Liitzen, and has been presented to the Gothenburg Museum, which is also in possession of Forsberg's Family of Acrobats, a very skillfully executed figure painting.

French academic impressions from the seventies, which were present in Forsberg's art, are found also in the work of Gustaf Cederstrom, who was born in Stockholm in 1845. His large canvas The Funeral Procession of Charles XII, painted in 1878, is universally known. The original is now

The Funeral procession of Charles XII, by Gustaf Cederstrom. In the National Museum at Stockholm

in Russia, but a copy came to the National Museum in 1884. In this popular painting the interesting motif has been treated with loftiness and grandeur. The period of Charles XII has often been pictured by this artist, whose cold scale of colors seems suited to the winter atmosphere that lies over those stern and hard times. But there was enthusiasm also beneath the austere surface, and in his Magnus Stenbock on the 27th of September, 1709, placed in the Provincial Assembly Hall in Malmo, he has demonstrated his ability to express this as well. In Cederstrom's large painting

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Narva, in the National Museum, a product which is rather unsatisfactory from a coloristic standpoint, the artist has shown the first and most brilliant act of the drama of Charles XII. Cederstrom's woman Salvationist trying to convert some bar-room habitues is one of his best paintings. Carl Gustaf Hellquist, who died in Munich in 1890, was a painter of historical themes who received much apprecia- tion in Germany, where he spent most of his time. He lays great stress on archeological details, and is sober and dry in his coloring, but has painted some good pictures whenever he has avoided that theatrical strain which has tainted so many historical paintings. He is most successful perhaps in The Religious Discussion between Olavus Petri and Peder Galle. The Sacking of Visby is not wholly free from pose.

VIII

THE OPPONENTS. NEW TENDENCIES IN SWEDISH PAINTING

THE beginning of the eighties was a turbulent period in the world of Swedish art. Many of the artists had had their eyes opened to the rich growth of sculpture and painting that flourished in France. They had eagerly sought to utilize for their own ends the new suggestions from Paris, and had learned the value of a closer and more thorough study of nature and a broader method of painting. They had become interested in painting the life that pulsates round about us in fields and meadows, in drawing-rooms and factories. Efforts were now made to paint the motif on the spot — outdoor painting — and to obtain stronger light effects. All this was pursued with youthful enthusiasm, and when the results were exhibited at the Opponents' Exhibi- tion in Stockholm in 1885, they were met by that mocking laughter with which the new has always been greeted. Among the "Opponents," who opposed the academic con- ception and method of teaching, there were, at the close of the century, many artists who were known and admired all over Europe, and who, more than any of their predecessors, had made Swedish art known and respected in the circles and among the people who, in the course of time, have most influenced European judgment of art. Many of the Oppo- nents united in 1886 and formed Konstnarsforbundet.

Among all the Opponents, Ernst Josephson was perhaps the most oppositional nature. Violence and weakness, tend- encies at once revolutionary and romantic, were found in him, and his contribution to Swedish art has been invaluable. Ernst Josephson was born in a highly cultured Jewish

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family in Stockholm. In the beginning of the seventies, he went through the Academy of Arts, and he afterwards travelled in Holland, Italy, and France. At first he was strongly influenced by the Dutch and Venetian schools of art; then he went to Paris, where he received deep impres- sions from Manet. When Josephson exhibited his portraits at the Paris Salon in 1 88 1, he was lauded in the foremost art magazine of France, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, as one of the greatest of contemporary portrait painters. It was more difficult to obtain recognition in his native land.

Josephson was the man who took the initiative in the above-mentioned opposition to the Academy, the result of which was Konstnarsforbundet. The duration of his crea- tive period was to be short; for as early as 1888, during his art studies in Brittany, he was attacked by a mental disease. An unusually rich and intense inner life lies back of his art, and is revealed in his coloring as well as in his ideas. In fact, this characteristic quality can be detected even in the sketches which were made during his illness. Though hazy and distorted, they often disclose the guiding light of genius, while they are conventionalized in execution.

Josephson had learned much from Rembrandt and the Venetians of the sixteenth century. He made a superb copy after Rembrandt's* Director of the Clothes Dealers' Guild, and his first paintings bear witness to influences from the old masters. In 1878 he painted Saul and David, with its warm golden tone and its rich, deep pigments, calling to mind the Venetian masters of the Renaissance. The painting has been presented to the National Museum by a society called Friends of the National Museum.

Josephson is excellently represented in the finely selected and arranged collection of Klas Fahaeus in Hogberga, Lidingd, where a whole wall is devoted to him. The eye is at once arrested by the portrait of Fru Gustaf af Geijer- stam, with its look of foreboding, while perhaps the most noteworthy of all is the large painting Cheating Gamesters, a mere sketch but masterly from a coloristic and dramatic viewpoint. Among Josephson's portraits are those of the

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The Journalist G. Renholm, by Ernst Josephson. In the National Museum at Stockholm

two artists, his friend, Allan Osterlind, in the Gothenburg Museum, and a splendidly characterized picture of Carl Skanberg, the elegant, hunchbacked artist, pictured with a Gobelin tapestry as background. It is especially in the por- trait of the Swedish-French journalist Renholm, sketched in his black suit against the cream-colored wall, that Joseph-

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Spanish Blacksmiths, by Ernst Josephson. In the National Gallery at Christiania

son has introduced a freedom and breadth and at the same time a fresh modernity, which makes this production a mile- stone in the development of Swedish art. The same quali- ties and maybe more of the "joy of painting" are found in his Spanish Blacksmiths, done in 1882 in Seville, and now adorning the National Gallery in Christiania. Among his portraits of women are Fru Bagge, nee Heyman, in a black dress and with a bouquet of flowers, and the excellent portrait

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Fru Jeanette Rubenson, by Ernst Josephson. Loaned to the National Museum

of Fru Rubenson, at once conventionalized and realistic and with a delightful mixture of Orientalism and Swedish sum- mer pleasure.

Before illness broke his strength, he executed his large and violently contested painting The Water Sprite which is in the collection of Prince Eugen. It was painted in Eggedal, a few miles north of Drammen in Norway, and represents a young boy who in the midst of sunshine plays his despair upon a golden violin. With its blue and green tones, with the light body of the youth against the cliffs and foaming cataract, this work represents Josephson's strange

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The Water Sprite, by Ernst Josephson. In Prince Eugen's home, ValdemarsuoMe, Stockholm

union of realism and romanticism. It is a cry of anguish and unsatisfied longing, of despair at the impossibility of giving form to the emotions of the soul. This remarkable

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work of art, at one time offered by its royal owner to the National Museum, which refused it, was not adequately appreciated even by Josephson's comrades among the Oppo- nents. It is now set in a wall in what is possibly the most beautiful home in Sweden, that of Prince Eugen at Valde- marsudde in Stockholm. The artist has treated the same theme more harmoniously in another smaller painting called The Nix, presented to the National Museum by the "Friends" of that institution. One seems to hear the mighty, full-toned stroke of the bow, mingling with the roar of the cataract, when the tawny, leaf-crowned boy plays in the summer night.

Carl Hill, who died insane in 191 1, received strong im- pulses in France from the impressionistic painting of light, and has left some landscapes which show that Swedish art suffered a great loss when he broke down so early. August Hagborg and Hugo Salmson, who were also counted among the Opponents, may be said to belong, through choice of themes and technique and prolonged residence in France, to French art. Hagborg is fond of painting the people on the shore of northern France, the silver-grey sky, and the greenish-blue waves. Among his scenes from the seashore may be mentioned Waiting, a fisherman's wife from Skane, who with her child on her arm is watching for her husband. Hagborg won fervent admiration through his painting Low Tide near La Manche. Hugo Salmson was influenced by Bastien-Lepage and other French painters of country folk in the choice of his motifs from the villages in Picardy. His White Beet Harvesters, in the Gothenburg Museum, painted in 1878, shows this tendency. He has also found motifs for many pictures in Skane, as in The Gleaners, in some well painted interiors of peasants' cottages, and in The Children at the Gate in Dalby, which was purchased by the French government, and is probably the representation of Swedish peasant life most popular on the Continent.

Per Ekstrom is an important landscape painter. Long a resident in France, he received impressions from the French landscape painters, impressions which, however, he has used

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in his own art with much independence. Ekstrom is a color- ist, whether he paints the barren heaths of his native island, Oland, or lets a red evening sun play with luminous beams over glittering waters and greyish-violet cliffs. Carl Skan- berg, through pictures distinguished not least from the view- point of color, introduced, about 1880, a new freshness into Swedish landscape painting. Especially the harbor motifs from Holland and Venice are comparable with the best of contemporary landscape painting, and perhaps the foremost of all is the pearl grey, masterly canvas Santa Maria della Salute in the Rain, which was presented by Ernst Joseph- son to the National Museum. How airy, clear, and exqui- site in color does not this painting appear compared with G. V. Palm's hard, monotonously tinted pictures of Venice ! The sterling art of Carl Larsson is typical of much that was best among the so-called Opponents of the eighties. He was born in Stockholm in 1853 and began his career as an illustrator. We have had few good illustrators in Sweden, but in his drawings to the poems of Anna Maria Lenngren, and not less in his genuinely Stockholmian sketches to Sehl- stedt's Songs, he developed a combination of wit and essen- tial Swedishness heretofore unequalled among us. Larsson went to France, and there became engaged to Karin Bergoo. His artistic talenfcburst into full bloom in the water-color of a French Peasant Girl grinning in the sunlight among red and yellow flowers, painted in 1883 and now in the National Museum; in delicate and Verdant garden pictures; and in the water-color masterpiece Grez sur Loing, representing Fru Anna Liljefors at the shore of Loing, now in possession of Fru M. Levisson in Gothenburg. These motifs are taken from Grez, a small town near the forest of Fontainebleau, about seventy kilometers southeast of Paris. There lived at the beginning of the eighties a large number of those Swedish artists who have given the name "Opponents" an honored place in the history of art, among them Carl Lars- son, Karl Nordstrom, and others. A characteristic of Lars- son was his restless productivity. Everything he has done is instinct with energy and joy of life, and it is only when

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Mother and Daughter. Water-color by Carl Larsson. Owned by Ernest Thiel, Stockholm

genius is combined with such indomitable love of work that it can lead, as with him, to great results. An example of this is his revival of monumental fresco painting. Through the generosity of a native of Gothenburg, P. Fiirstenberg, he was able to make, in 1891, his first attempt at mural painting in a girls' school in Gothenburg. Hereby Swedish art not only gained some excellent new paintings to add to its treasures of beauty, but an important beginning was made in reintroducing art into life and, instead of storing it away in museums, letting it shine — as during the Renaissance — in everyday life, giving ideality to a place of daily toil.

Herr Fiirstenberg's art collection, established with pres- cient taste and containing much of the very best of vital Swedish art from the close of the century, has now been presented to the Gothenburg Museum. Here are found the three large decorative mural paintings by Larsson, de- picting the three epochs in art, Renaissance, Rococco, and

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Woman Sitting. Etching by Carl Larsson

Modern Art. These three are resplendent with color; and the last mentioned, in its fresh, happy scale of colors, has a typical air of the eighties. The foreground is occupied by an artist modelling in clay the statue of a woman; behind him is seen Larsson himself as an outdoor painter, with a Japanese looking on to call to mind the admiration of the new movement for Japanese art. In the background we see Paris, the city where a more thorough technique was learned, and a new, less conventional view of nature was inculcated.

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Paris, the city of violet lights in an atmosphere filled with chalk-dust. The half finished Eiffel Tower rises beyond the Seine, and a midday haze lies over the landscape. A warm, red cactus flower in the foreground has an exhilarating effect like a cheerful trumpet blast. Beneath the painting Larsson has sculptured in high relief a naked young woman, who turns her back and the pretty, merry profile toward the spectator; in her whole supple figure we find the joy and youthfulness which the new art purposed to give.

In the Paris of 1880 there were many Swedes. There Strindberg wrote his turbulent stories so full of spring feel- ing, and there the Opponents learned to paint from good teachers in an environment which was stimulating and ab- sorbed in art. It was the second time that our art became indebted to France; but the art of the eighteenth century languished, when it was transplanted to our indifferent and parsimonious fatherland. The fresh art of the eighties, on the other hand, flourished and shot new, national shoots in our land, encouraged by Swedish patrons of art, but also vigorously combated in many influential circles.

Larsson executed a monumental achievement — not only with respect to physical dimensions — in his gigantic frescoes above the staircase of the National Museum. Carl Lars- son learned from the art of Japan and the rococo, and most assuredly appropriated impressions also from the decorative paintings of Tiepolo; but in temperament he was wholly a Swede, and these frescoes are not only an expres- sion of Swedish generosity, but are Swedish in their concep- tion and execution with an abundant measure of the splen- dor and magnificence that we have loved from days of old. The expense of the frescoes was defrayed from a fund created by Froken Sofia Gieseke and the merchant J. H. Scharp, who have thereby given proof of a patronage worthy of the gratitude of all Swedish citizens and the emulation of the wealthier among them. The six frescoes, three on each wall, represent an equal number of episodes in the history of Swedish art. All these episodes, with the exception of one, are localized in the Royal Palace, around which Swedish art

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Gustavus III in Logarden Receiving the Antique Statues He Had

Purchased in Italy. Fresco by Carl Larsson, in the stairway of the

National Museum

centered during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ehrenstrahl, the Father of Swedish Painting, for whom Charles XI, the surly royal economist, is posing as a model, is the theme of the first. The central part on the same wall shows Nikodemus Tessin the Younger, the gifted architect of the Royal Palace, who is giving over to Harleman the task of completing the Palace. The aging Tessin is repre- sented with monumental breadth against a background of scaffolding and mural surfaces. To the right of this picture is seen the Frenchman Taraval's Painting School, where the young Swedish artists who helped to decorate the Palace

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received guidance in their art. As mentioned before, Tara- val's school furnished the initial impetus for the establishment of the Academy of Arts. The undulating lines of the rococo, the instructive, guiding attitude of the teacher, and the set- ting up of the model are all rendered effectively and in a manner typical of the time. The left side of the opposite wall is occupied by a picture from Louise Ulrica's library at Drottningholm. The Maecenas Karl Gustav Tessin, the grand-seigneur of European fame, is showing the queen, who was much interested in art, his treasures of engravings and sketches which he had brought home from Paris, and which now constitute a precious part of the collections of the mu- seum. On the middle fresco Gus- tavus III is seen in Logarden receiving the antique statues he had purchased in Italy. The words "there was a glamour over the days of Gustavus" stand out vividly before our mind, when we behold the festive joy which radi- ates from the mural surface and meets the spectator. To the right of this fresco Sergei is repre- sented working on his Cupid and Psyche. Sergei's countenance has something of a deeply brooding nature; one can understand that in this magnificent head were born the visions of beauty later giv- en form in marble. Original composition, manly and confident execution, and the jubilant tone of the mighty harmony of colors make these six fres- coes, completed in the autumn of 1896, not only the largest but also the best monumental painting that our country has produced up to this time. In 1908 Larsson continued the decoration of the grand staircase by adding his gigantic work in oil, The Entry of Gustavus Vasa into Stockholm,

Sergei at work on His Cupid and Psyche. Fresco by Carl Larsson, in the National Museum

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Midsummer Eve, 1523. It is well placed over the door, and shows Gustavus, a picture of Swedish vigor and health, riding on his white horse bedecked with flowers. The draw- bridge and the cheering multitude outside the city wall have been used by the artist to create a composition of unusual monumental effect. A work which was highly valued by the artist himself, but is not held in great esteem by many of his admirers, either from the viewpoint of color or contents, is A Midwinter Offering, picturing an Uppsala king who sacri- fices himself. In 19 15 it was sketched on an immense card- board, and the artist intended that it should be executed in fresco as a pendant to The Entry of Gustavus Vasa.

In an atelier in the North Latin School in Stockholm, Larsson painted, in the summer of 1901, a fresco represent- ing the pupils of the school gathered for Prayer in Ladu- gardsgardet. The fact that he here has pictured his own time in its own dress will give this painting an historical value in addition to its great artistic merits. One of the best things from a decorative point of view that Larsson has ever done is the oil painting sunk into the white ceiling of the lobby in the Dramatic Theatre. The Birth of the Drama is the name of this imaginative ceiling-piece, in which a female form symbolizing the poet's idea is seen amid the three crowns gliding across the nocturnal sky, while in her wake follow the human passions, nude and wonderfully well drawn bodies of men and women. At one end we see the poet, at the other the actor receives the embodied idea which he is to reveal later to the spectators.

Larsson's pictures from his home, Sundborn in Dalecarlia, have contributed most to making him a popular painter. He shows himself in them an unexcelled portrayer of children, while every piece of furniture seems to thrive in an atmos- phere of humor and harmony. In these rumpled young- sters, portrayed with the double keen-sightedness of love and art, there is an effervescing joy and a kindly roguishness, qualities which indeed characterize Carl Larsson's whole artistic production. The group My Family, painted in life size, deserves special mention. It represents Carl Lars-

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son's wife and chil- dren in the yard at Sundborn, and is found in the collec- tion of Thorsten Laurin in Stockholm. The artist has paint- ed his own person in two remarkable por- traits of himself, one of them, in the Thiel collection, in half length, the other showing him envel- oped in a yellow dressing gown. This last portrait especial- ly has an impressive air. Carl Larsson pos- sessed the prodigality of genius to an un- usually high degree. Frescoes, oils, water- colors, sketches, lithographs, and etch- ings of high value have been created by this remarkable ar- tist, who infuses into all his work the dis- tinguishing touch of his own personality, even though all have not the same value,

and sometimes a certain calligraphic dryness and sweetish- ness appears. Carl Larsson's art possesses to a rare degree the great and precious qualities of originality and style. His production was cut short by his death in 19 19.

Portrait of Self, by Carl Larsson. Gothenburg Museum

In the

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The artistic career of Hugo Birger, who was born in Stockholm in 1854 and died in 1887, was brief. In his color he is often hard and garish, and he liked to choose themes that allowed the use