Carl Fredrik Hill

"I would just like to mention, that in me Sweden will get a painter whose like they have never seen," Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911) wrote to his father in the spring of 1872 from Stockholm, where he was studying at the Royal Academy of Arts . Hill went on to become one of Sweden's foremost landscape painters, but did not receive the acclamation he had hoped for in his lifetime. In the winter of 1873, he travelled to Paris, expecting immediate success - he wanted to "astound the world and earn loads of money". Later, too, in his schizophrenic phase, he was hoping for success, calling himself maximus pictor, the greatest of painters. When Hill died in his home in Lund in February of 1911, he was still an unknown celebrity.

During the one hundred years that have passed since his death, the exhibitions have succeeded one another, in Sweden and abroad. Assessments have varied, and so too the relative importance of the paintings from the so called sane period in comparison to those painted in ill-health. The exhibition features both these creative periods in Hill's life and also shows how they link into one another.

The exhibition, first shown at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, features the artist's famed river landscapes and flowering fruit trees from his time in France, as well as the visionary drawings from his years of mental ill-health in Lund, Sweden. 

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KünstlerInnen: Carl Fredrik Hill