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424
IV. EDUCATION AND MENTAL CULTURE IN SWEDEN.
at sixty years of age returned to Stockholm, where he became of great consequence
to the development of the Academy. He then painted his chief picture, The
Coronation of Gustavus HI (the National museum), which, however, remained
unfinished. L. Desprez (1737/1804) likewise occupies a place by himself; he was
called in as a scene-painter for the new opera-house but also worked as a painter
of pictures and as an architect. A soul most congenial to Sergei, in being an
adherent of Neo-antiquity, was J. A. Masreliez (1747/1810), who already in his
childhood had arrived in Sweden; a man more notable for his refinement, his
ability as a teacher and promoter of industrial art, and for his art of drawing
than for his pictures. To the same sphere also belonged Elias Martin (1739/1818),
who mainly studied in London and became our first real landscape-painter,
preceded only by the insignificant J. Seoenbom (1721/84), who has painted views
of Stockholm. But Martin was moreover a figure-painter and a sensitive
por-trayer of rank, in whose works his English studies may be traced. The same is
the case with the last portrayer in the era of Gustavus HI, K. F. v. Breda
(1759/1818), who after studying with Sir Joshua Reynolds in London, achieved
excellent likenesses of the ladies and gentlemen of his time, whom he knew how
to render with a good characteristic and fine colouring.
During the 18th century, the art of chalcography was also cultivated with a
certain predilection, and the principal followers of it were: P. G. Floding
(1731/91), who even organized an engravers’ school, J. Gillberg (1724/93), and
J. F. Martin (1756/1816) — brother of the painter — who besides portraits
also made landscapes.
Had painting, like sculpture, had a period of golden days during the Gustavian
era, the position of these two arts, during the first decades that followed 1809,
became rather different. While sculpture, as we have seen, subsequently to Sergei
kept to a relatively high standard, there occurred namely, soon after the decease
of the surviving Gustavians, a retrograde in the art of painting, which now offers
little of interest. The representatives of this untalented jog-trot were f. Westin
(1782/1862), whose historical pieces were equally void and sleek as his portraits,
and P. Krafft, Jun. (1777/1863), who in the beginning inspired great hopes,
which, however, in course of time, by and by fell into dust. And, though
denominated »a romanticist before romanticism», the landscape-painter K. J.
Fahlcrantz (1774/1861) nevertheless was no artist of rank, even if it cannot be
denied that he, at times, understood how to collect the impressions of Swedish natural
scenery into a tone that created a wholecast picture. — The academic tendency
soon met with opposition, not only by criticism, but also by artists longing for a
more liberal and natural conception and mode of presentation. The first champion
for this opposition was K. G. Sandberg (1782/1854) backed by Fogelberg, the
sculptor. His sketches from the people’s life, and the historical frescoes in Uppsala
Cathedral were respectable attempts at a new style of presentation; his portraits
certainly did not come up to Breda’s but still they were truer than those by Westin.
These three — Westin, Fahlcrantz, and Sandberg — never went abroad,
and the studies in Paris had now come to an end. It was Rome instead that
the painters — like the sculptors before them — at present had in view. One
among the first to find his way to Rome was O. J. Södermark (1790/1848),
one of the many military men in Sweden who have acquired the name of an
artist. He was a clever portrayer, who honestly and faithfully kept to nature.
Still more accomplished within the same sphere was his protégé in Rome, U.
Troili (1815/75), with whom this kind of painting again began to rise in Sweden.
A third pilgrim for the same place was N. J. Blommér (1816/53), who via
Paris arrived in Rome, where an early death awaited him when, in a foreign
country, he had given shape to his imaginative dreams about the sagas and
mythological figures of the North. Egron Lundgren (1815/75) visited not only Rome
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