Excerpt from Eugen Wretholm's book on Evert Lundquist (1977): “Once, Lundquist truly took up a motif from the Drottningholm Park. He has extracted a solitary tree from its context, encircled it with a ring of desolation, transforming it into a mythical being. I experienced it as nature's explosive generative force bursting forth from the earth.”

Already at the artist's first exhibition, at the Artists' House in Stockholm in 1934, opinions were divided and critics sometimes took diametrically opposed positions. Above all, it was Lundquist's very personal and peculiar colour palette, along with a powerful and almost eruptive technique, that raised doubts. However, the critics were unanimous on one point: there was a great measure of talent.

It has been said that in Swedish art, only Carl Fredrik Hill and Ernst Josephson achieve a similar synthesis of the sensual and the supersensual, of something that is insistently physical and simultaneously metaphysical. Evert Lundquist is, alongside Carl Kylberg, the great romantic of the 20th century in art.

When Evert Lundquist wraps his painting around solitary objects such as a chair, an axe, a plate, or as in the auction's painting - an independent and free-standing tree - Strindberg also employs the monolithic symbol; a sea wave, a navigational mark, or a flower. The motif, The Tree, results in an expression of compressed solitude, the strength of an isolated person in adversity.