Important Winter Sale presents Carl Fredrik Hill
Bukowskis presents "Jordkällare med figur, Luc-sur-Mer" by Carl Fredrik Hill at this season's largest live auction – Important Winter Sale.
In August 1876, Carl Fredrik Hill arrived in Luc-sur-Mer in Normandy. Here, on the French Atlantic coast, Hill discovered a surprisingly new and inspiring field of motifs. During the space of scarcely a month, he produced 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 on the Loing near Grez, much frequented by both French and foreign artists. This year was perhaps Hill’s most transformative and creative period in France. Asphalt paint disappears from his palette, his painting blossoms, his output is impressive. A certain part of this development must be attributed to Hill’s experience of the second Impressionist exhibition that same year. The sun-drenched streets and sandy banks of the Montigny district eventually became too much for Hill. He decided to travel out to the coast, an idea he may have got from his older friend and patron Gegerfelt.” (Back to Normandy. Nordic Artists in Normandy 1850–1900, 1992.)
Why Hill chose Luc-sur-Mer specifically is not known; medical reasons may possibly have played a part. Typical of Luc is the extremely abundant formation of seaweed on the beach, visible only at low tide. This gave Luc a particular reputation as a health resort; doctors recommended bathing here as especially fortifying for body and mind. It is possible that the physically and mentally rather exhausted Hill came with the intention of strengthening himself with restorative seaweed baths. In his first letter from Luc-sur-Mer, dated 9 August 1876, Hill writes: “For a week I have been painting the Atlantic Ocean, and every time I have finished my sitting I bathe in the said ocean.” Concerning his work, we learn that from morning to evening he made sketches of the “sea marshes”. Wingren continues: “When Hill writes that he paints the sea as if it were a marsh, this is not a poetic metaphor but should be understood literally. When the sea at low tide retreats from the shores of Luc, a teeming world of organisms is laid bare: green-black underwater vegetation, water-worn stony sections and hollows that shelter shellfish and fish that have not managed to escape. […] It appears that Hill was constantly fascinated by this natural spectacle, by the mosaic of colour tones that unfolded there. The phenomenon helped release his ‘colour music’. The sea and the sky—the wide expanse—also played their part in lightening his palette.”
Viggo Loos has commented on the beach motifs from Luc-sur-Mer, which in his view “occupy a remarkable place in the development of our painting”: “Hill loved this coastal landscape. […] In a large group of motifs he is entirely a plein-air painter, devoting himself intensely to the study of light, air, the colouristic enchantments of the shore and the colour play of the sea. […] It is the sea’s stillness and grandeur that have moved the painter. […] He is himself aware that he is achieving something he had not previously been capable of—‘so bold, so new, so fresh, so unbridled and yet so restrained by a true feeling for nature’. […] One understands his own remark that things acquire their form when one steps back and sees the play of light, air and colour.” Loos continues by describing those motifs where “the green band of the sea passes into a silver-white stripe”, and the artist “immediately” and “intensely” captures “the shimmering haze of an August day’s blazing sun over sea and coast beneath the bright summer sky. If the term ‘impression’ may ever be used, it is here.” (The Breakthrough of Plein-Air Painting in Swedish Art 1860–1885, 1945.)
Hill himself wrote: “There is no more likeness between what I previously did and what I do now than between night and day. As heavy, dark and gloomy as my works have been until now, so light, airy and delicate are they today. Asphalt is totally banned. But what may make it difficult for people to take this in is that I have laid down as the first and necessary logistical rule: not to finish.” This reasoning connects to a letter Hill had written home to Sweden a few weeks earlier: “I have now come to the conviction that in art there is nothing to seek but the true, le vrai.”
Erik Blomberg offers the following perspective on Hill’s coastal motifs: “What one must admire above all in these dazzlingly fresh canvases is the extraordinarily lively brushwork: the variation between smooth and impasto passages, the black touches that not only mark the scattered belts of seaweed but at the same time give relief to the light. It is a technique that never becomes an end in itself, but serves nature entirely, giving renewed life to the elements, to the moment when the sunlight, like a blinding flash, strikes a silver breach in the verdigris-green sea.” (Carl Fredrik Hill. His Healthy and Sick Art, 1949.) Later in life, Hill returned in memory to his 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” Hill mentions brings to mind Sixten Strömbom’s description of the almost otherworldly emotional intensity Hill experienced during his time in Luc-sur-Mer: “Hill now moved very rapidly towards the zenith of his creativity. […] The colourful play of light across the expanses and coastal formations forced forth the innermost impulse of his being, his longing for the greatness of simplicity and an almost ecstatically heightened sense of life.” (The History of the Artists’ Association I, 1945.)
The work will be sold at Important Winter Sale
Estimate: 1 500 000 - 2 000 000 SEK
Viewing December 4–9, Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm
Open weekdays 11 AM to 6 PM CET, weekends 11 AM to 4 PM CET
Live auction December 10–12, Arsenalsgatan 2, Stockholm
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View all of the Works by Carl Fredrik Hill at Important Winter Sale
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