Carl Fredrik Hill

In one of the most interesting drawings from Director Jackie Neuman's collection, Landscape with Exotic Animals, we find the elephant cherished by Hill. A grouping of five palm trees leads diagonally into the picture space where four animals stand facing to the right. In solitary majesty and facing the other way, an elephant rises above the other animals. The elephant appears in a number of Hill's drawings, including the similar "Palmer och branta berg" ("Palms and steep Mountains") (Nationalmuseum), with the difference that in the Nationalmuseum drawing Hill has also depicted what appear to be rhinos and hippos. The elephant reappears in several of Hill's drawings - for example, roaming freely over the savannah in the work "Elefanter under banyanträd" ("Elephants under banyan trees") or hiding in a cave in "Den vita elefanten i grottan” ("The white elephant in the cave")

Sten Åke Nilsson mentions how ‘the elephant had a special place in his private iconography’ and that ‘Hill marked his close relationship to the “totem animal” with an ivory paper knife with an elephant's head, which lay on his desk’

It is natural to see the elephant, where it stands in solitude, as a symbol of the artist himself, who for more than thirty years of his life populated his own inner exotic landscape, from which he interpreted the outer landscape in a peculiar way, as Artur Lundkvist wrote: ‘The palm trees are his palm trees, storm-torn and devastated; the rivers fight with the deserts for supremacy and the waterfalls are there, the animals of the jungle gather in worship before the waterfalls, listening to their mighty music’.