Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Education and Mental Culture. Introd. by P. E. Lindström - 10. Fine Arts - Painting. By [C. R. Nyblom] Carl G. Laurin
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painting.
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as an artist decorator 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 the Neo-Antique, was L. A. Masreliez (1747 — lSlO), who had
arrived in Sweden in his early childhood; a man more notable for his
refinement, his ability as a teacher and as a promoter of industrial art with purity of
ornamentation, and for his drawing, than for his pictures. To the same circle
also belonged Elias Martin (1739 —1818), who studied mainly in London, and
became Sweden’s first real landscape painter, preceded only by J. Sevenbom
(1721—84), an unimportant man who painted views of Stockholm. But Martin
was, moreover, a figure-painter and at times a really good portrait-painter, in
whose works his English studies and the dawn of romance may be traced. The
same is the case with the last portrait-painter of the epoch of Gustavus III, K.
F. v. Breda (1759—1818), who after studying with Sir Joshua Reynolds in London,
produced excellent likenesses of ladies and gentlemen of his time, whom he
rendered with characterization, bringing to mind the English art of his day,
with an aristocratic atmosphere and a flavour of the melancholy then fashionable.
During the 18th century, the art of line-engraving was also cultivated with
a certain predilection, and the principal engravers were: P. G. Floding (1731
—91), who even organized an engravers’ school, J. Gillberg (1724—93), and
J. F. Martin (1755—1816) — brother of the painter — who, besides painting
portraits, also painted landscapes and pictures from Stockholm.
If painting, like sculpture, had enjoyed a golden period during the Gustavian
Period, the position of these two arts, during the first few decades after 1809,
would have become rather different. While, as we have seen, sculpture,
subsequent to Sergei, kept at a relatively high standard, there occurred, soon after
the decease of the surviving Gustavians, a retrograde movement in the art of
painting, which now offers little of interest. The representatives of this
un-talented routine-work were F. Westin (1782—1862), whose historical pieces
were as meaningless and monotonus as his portraits, and P. Krafft, the Younger
(1777—1863), who at first inspired great hopes as a portrait-painter, but these
in course of time, were gradually falsified. He painted his best portraits in
the 18th century. The landscape-painter, K. J. Fahlcrantz (1774—1861),
attained a certain celebrity for his romantic pictures with a kind of vague and
"universal" ideal. — The academic tendency soon met with opposition, not
only from critics, but also from artists longing for a more liberal and natural
conception and mode of presentation. The first champion of this opposition was
J. G. Sandberg (1782—1854), and he was seconded by Fogelberg, the sculptor.
His sketches from popular life and the historical frescoes in Uppsala Cathedral
were respectable attempts at a new style of presentation; his portraits certainly
were not to be compared with Breda’s, but they were always truer than those
of Westin.
These three — Westin, Fahlcrantz, and Sandberg — never went abroad, and
studies in Paris had now come to an end. It was to Rome instead that the
painters — like the sculptors before them — wended their way for study.
Among the first to find their way to Rome was O. J. Södermark (1790—1848),
one of the many military men in Sweden who have acquired fame as
artists. He was a clever portraitist, who honestly and faithfully kept to nature.
His Berzelius, Jenny Lind, and Fredrika Bremer are classed among the really
good portraits produced in the first half of the 19th century. A still more
accomplished man 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.
This all too unassuming artist was noted for his sense of colour and his
character. His portraits of A. 0. Wallenberg, the financier, and his wife adorn the
National Museum. A third pilgrim to Rome was A*. J. Blommér (1816—53),
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