"Trädet och vägen" (The Tree and the Road)
Signed HiLL. Executed in Brolles/Bois-le-Roi during spring/early summer of 1877. Oil on relined canvas 32.5 x 46 cm.
Mrs. Marie Louise Klason (née Hill, the artist's sister), Stockholm; Mrs. Petra Hedborg (née Klason, the artist's niece), Brussels; Verner Åmell Ltd, Stockholm; private collection.
(Possibly) Malmö Museum, Sweden, "Carl Fredrik Hill. Retrospektiv utställning", 1933, possibly identical to no. 88 ("Väg med blommande träd. 1876-77. Tillhör generalkonsul K.E. Hedborg, Bruxelles"); Blaafarveværket, Åmot, Norway, "Kong Jeg", 18 May - 22 September 2002, no. 56.
Adolf Anderberg, "Carl Hill. Hans liv och hans konst", 1951, illustrated full page, plate 97.
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Carl Fredrik Hill was a Swedish artist born in Lund. Hill is considered one of Sweden's formost landscape painters. His fate and artistry are perhaps the strangest but most interesting in Swedish art history. Born in an academic home in Lund, despite his father's protests, he managed to begin studies at the Art Academy in Stockholm and then traveled to France, where he came in contact with Corot's landscape painting. He found his inspiration in Barbizon and later on the River Oise, in Luc-sur-Mer and Bois-le-Roi. He painted frantically with the hope of being accepted into the Salon de Paris. Already during his student years, he struggled with an incipient mental illness and at the age of 28 he was taken to the mental hospital in Passy. During the hospital stay he began his rich production of drawings and then continued with the production after his return to Lund, where he was cared for by his family for the rest of his life. In thousands drawings, a fantasy world of figures scenes appears. Today, Hill's river landscape and flowering fruit trees from the years in France, together with the visionary drawings from the period of illness in Lund, have received great recognition. His art depicts a loneliness and longing that is easy to get caught up in. He is mainly represented at the Malmö Museum and at the National Museum in Stockholm.
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