Hertervig - Hill

We are happy to announce the exhibition Hertervig – Hill, which is to be shown at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, 21 September 2024 – 27 January 2025 and at Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, 22 February – 18 May 2025. The exhibition is organized jointly by the two museums in collaboration with Nordic Institute of Art.

This exhibition will present the works of the Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig in dialogue with the oeuvre of the Swedish painter Carl Fredrik Hill, and will include up to 100 works altogether. Though two highly individual artists from different generations, there are many parallels in both the lives and artistic developments of Hertervig and Hill.

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902) grew up on the island of Borgøy on the south-west coast of Norway outside Stavanger; a landscape that would be a recurring theme in his art. After attending the Royal Drawing School in Oslo, he went on to Düsseldorf in the early 1850s as a student of the Norwegian professor Hans Gude at the Art Academy. Tragically, Hertervig was taken ill and went back to Norway, where he for a period had himself interned at a mental hospital. The remains of his life were spent in the domestic environments at Borgøy and in Stavanger, were the artist worked in relative isolation and with limited means. In the 1860s and 70s, Hertervig painted a series of striking landscapes in both oil and watercolour; some representing a fascination for decay, others more contemplative – bleak visions of nature, sometimes perhaps based on vague memories.

Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911) was born in Lund in southern Sweden. After studies at the Art Academy in Stockholm, specializing as a landscape painter, he lived for several years in Paris during the 1870s. Influenced by Camille Corot, Hill would paint – together with other Nordic artists – plein air studies from Barbizon and other places popular among the landscape painters of the day. His early works reflect the ideals of the realist movement and open-air painting. In 1877 Hill was hospitalized in an institution for the mentally ill in Passy, France, where he stayed for the next five years. The last three decades of his life, Hill lived with his family in his childhood home of Lund. The artist continued to draw and paint on his own – in isolation – working mostly on paper. While Hill continued to depict landscapes, they now took on a more fantastic air, and he also drew figures, animals and imaginary creatures. These works have the character of dreams or visions.

The project represents the first exhibition ever of Hertervig’s work in Sweden, and is also the first major exhibition of Hill in Norway in decades. Hertervig – Hill thus aims at introducing the oeuvre of the two artists to new audiences. While the exhibition will present works spanning from the entire production of the two artists, it will emphasize the more visionary or spiritual works of both Hertervig and Hill – works that sometimes are seen as heralding Symbolism and Surrealism – and highlight both parallels and differences between them.

Hertervig – Hill is curated by Karin Sidén, Hanne Beate Ueland and Knut Ljøgodt. The project will be accompanied by a major publication with essays by leading art historians in the field.