Carl Fredrik Hill

"Several paintings from this summer have been inscribed with 'Fontainebleau' and appear to be executed in the same spot – an abandoned gravel pit. From a sketch we see how Hill quite quickly found his way into this landscape, yet the number of studies show that it presented him with an important artistic problem to solve; it was as if he was caught in a game of chess with only a few pieces remaining. A few bushes stretch like green fires up towards the sky. The light is intense everywhere. […] It is a terrain covered in wounds”.

This is what Professor Sten Åke Nilsson wrote in the National Museum exhibition catalogue Carl Fredrik Hill from 1999/2000.

In the present painting, "Skogsbacke", the desolate road stretches upwards through the gravel pit, towards the trees in the background. The strong light is reflected in the gravel, and the sandstone shines almost white in sharp contrast to the darker trees. Despite the bright light the unsettled sky is covered in ominous-looking clouds. Tree-tops moving in the wind have been recreated using quick, alternate brushstrokes. The artist has attacked the terrain with both his brush and palette knife, and the painting is in places thickly pasted, almost sculptural, built up by dynamically connected fields of colour. Hill has also scraped off the paint in certain areas to such a degree that the surface structure of the canvas emerges in the sparse stone sections, and in the evocatively unsettled sky.

Hill’s biographer Adolf Anderberg has described this unsettledness; how the grandness of nature, its solitude and the way it is often overlooked spoke directly to Hill’s sensibility. "He was seized by a strong feeling of communion with these solitary landscapes. In their interpretation he expressed much of what burnt and wrestled within him. These images, often realised in a state of ecstasy, are even more revealing than a self-portrait by the artist."

In his comprehensive book "Carl Hill. Hans liv och hans konst" from 1951, Anderberg mentions two pieces that share clear points of contact with the present lot: "Grustag och björkar" and "Grusbacke". The latter, in particular, shows striking similarities to "Skogsbacke". Because "Grusbacke" has been dated to 1876 by Anderberg and was marked by the artist with ‘F-au’ (for Fontainebleau), there are reasons to believe that the present painting was also executed at the same place and time.

These depictions of the fading ground, where Hill wrestles with how to deal with a play of light and colour without shadows, form part of an unusual transitional phase in Hill’s painting. It would eventually result in the depictions of transcendental beauty of the blossoming fruit trees in Brolles/Bois-le-Roi from the spring of 1877.