Carl Fredrik Hill

In August 1876, Carl Fredrik Hill arrived at Luc-sur-mer in Normandy. Here, along the French Atlantic coast, Hill discovered a surprisingly new and inspiring subject area. In just under a month, Hill created some of his most powerful and expressive landscape depictions. Bo Wingren provides the following background: "In early summer 1876, Hill was in Montigny, a small town by the Loing near Grez, frequented by both French and foreign artists. This year was perhaps Hill's most transformative and creative period in France. The asphalt paint disappears from the palette, the painting flourishes, his production is impressive. Part of this development must be attributed to Hill's experience of the second Impressionist exhibition that year. The sun-drenched streets and sandbanks of the Montigny area eventually became too much for Hill. He decided to travel to the coast, an idea he may have gotten from his older friend and protector Gegerfelt." ("Back to Normandy. Nordic Artists in Normandy 1850-1900", 1992).

Why Hill chose Luc-sur-Mer specifically is not clear, possibly medical reasons played a part. Typical for Luc is the extremely abundant seaweed formation on the beaches, visible only at low tide. This gave Luc a special reputation as a health spa, with doctors recommending the baths here as particularly strengthening for body and soul. Possibly, the purpose of the physically and mentally quite rundown artist was to strengthen himself with restorative seaweed baths. In his first letter from Luc-sur-mer, dated August 9, 1876, Hill writes: "I have been painting the Atlantic Ocean for a week and each time I finish my sitting I bathe in the aforementioned ocean." About his work, it is known that from morning to evening he makes sketches of the "sea marshes". Wingren continues: "When Hill writes that he paints the sea as a marsh, this is not a poetic metaphor but should be understood literally. When the sea at low tide recedes from the shores of Luc, a teeming world of organisms is exposed, green-black underwater vegetation, water-polished rocky areas, and cavities hiding shellfish and fish that did not escape. [...] It seems that Hill was constantly fascinated by this spectacle of nature, by the mosaic of colour tones that develops here. The phenomenon contributed to unleashing his 'colour music'. The sea and the sky – the vast space – also did their part to lighten his palette."

Viggo Loos has commented on the beach motifs from Luc-sur-mer, which according to him "occupy a remarkable place in the development of our painting": "Hill has loved this coastal nature. [...] In a large group of motifs, he is entirely a plein air painter and devotes himself intensely to the study of light, air, the beach's colouristic enchantments, and the sea's colour play. [...] It is the sea's tranquillity and grandeur that has captured the painter. [...] He himself is aware that he is achieving something that he has not managed before, 'so bold, so new, so fresh, so unrestrained and yet so restrained by a true feeling for nature'. [...] One understands his own statement, that things take their form when one steps back and sees the light and air and colour play." Loos continues by describing the motifs where "the green sea's stripe transitions into a silver-white string" and the artist "immediately" and "intensely" captures "the August day's scorching heat as a shimmering haze over sea and coast under the bright summer sky. If ever the term 'impression' can be used, it is here." ("The Breakthrough of Plein Air Painting in Swedish Art 1860-1885", 1945).

Hill himself wrote: "There is no more resemblance between what I have done before and what I am doing now than between night and day. As heavy, dark, and gloomy as my opus has been so far, so bright, light, and airy are they now. The asphalt is totally banned. But what makes it difficult for people to accept this is that I have set up as the first and necessary logistical rule: not to execute." This reasoning ties back to the letter Hill wrote home to Sweden a few weeks earlier: "I have now come to the conviction that in art there is nothing else to seek but the true, le vrai."

Erik Blomberg adds the following perspective regarding Hill's coastal motifs: "What one must admire most in these dazzlingly fresh canvases is the incredibly lively brushwork: the variation between smooth and pastose sections, the black touches that not only mark the scattered seaweed belts but at the same time give relief to the light. It is a technique that never becomes an end in itself, that is entirely in the service of nature, to give renewed life to the elements, to the moment when the sunlight like a dazzling flash strikes a silver breach in the verdigris sea." ("Carl Fredrik Hill. His Healthy and Sick Art", 1949).

In the later part of his life, Hill returns to the memory of the short, but immensely important, stay in Luc-sur-mer:

"At Luc I saw the high vault blue
So topaz-blue and yet shimmering...
In the sun shone the ebb's white banks
And seagulls flew over the beach's anchors...
In the sun shine the ebb's kisses shimmering
And the rippling on the beautiful surface glimmering
Is like diamonds in ethereal light..."

The "ethereal light" mentioned by Hill brings to mind Sixten Strömbom's description of the almost surreal emotional experience Hill had during his time in Luc-sur-mer: "Hill was now moving very quickly towards the zenith of his creativity. [...] The colourful light play of the expanses and coastal formations forced out his innermost drive, his longing for the simplicity's grandeur and an almost ecstatically heightened sense of life" ("The History of the Artists' Union I", 1945).