Werner Sundblad - Towards the West, Aspeboda, 1906

Werner Sundblad (1877–1909) Sweden

Mot Wester (Towards the West), Aspeboda, 1906

signed and dated lower right W S d 1906
mixed media on paper
unframed 52 × 46.5 cm (20.5 × 18.3 in)
framed 55 × 65 cm (21.7 × 25.6 in)

inscribed a tergo: “Lea Sundblad, Mot Wester, Aspeboda, utsigten från jägmästare H Sundblads balkong”

Provenance:
Lea Sundblad, the artist’s sister;
By descent within the family;
Private collection

Condition report:
Over all good condition. The sheet is spliced along the right margin, understood to be original. 

Essay
Mot Wester is a deeply concentrated landscape statement, executed in 1906 with a control of tone and atmosphere that belies the apparent informality of the medium. The image opens onto a high, winter quietude. A broad sky dotted with stars dominates the composition, its surface built from repeated, arcing strokes that create a delicate sense of vault and pressure, as if the air itself were structured. Below, the land is reduced to elemental registers: a dark ridge of forested height across the middle distance, a pale band of frozen water and snow fields, and a foreground marked by bare trees, scattered farm buildings, and small accents of dark vegetation emerging through the whiteness. The effect is not anecdotal. It is a meditation on seasons and on light. The viewer reads the landscape as lived and specific, yet it is also shaped into a near emblem of Nordic dusk and winter stillness. 

Several qualities make this work especially interesting, such as the strength in the work’s implied viewpoint. The verso inscription specifies that the motif is seen from the balcony of a forest manager, a detail that changes how the picture is understood. The scene is not an imaginary wilderness but a cultivated rural world observed from domestic elevation, a place where the rhythms of forestry and farming provide both labour and visual order. The small buildings in the snow fields are therefore not picturesque accessories. They function as the human measure within a landscape otherwise defined by the immensity of sky and the long sweep of the valley. The bare trees in the foreground accentuate this sense of season and time. Their vertical tracery interrupts the snow plane with a fragile linearity, suggesting cold and stillness, but also the latent return of spring.

The location, Aspeboda, belongs to a Dalarna landscape historically shaped by forest, waterways, and long settlement patterns connected to woodland work and the wider mining region around Falun. In the present work the sense of place is conveyed not through recognisable landmarks, but through structural character: the combination of an open valley floor with enclosing wooded heights, and the way winter simplifies the view into large, legible masses.

This sensitivity to twilight aligns closely with Sundblad’s artistic context. He was trained first at Tekniska skolan i Stockholm, today Konstfack, and later at Kungliga Konstakademien, in years when Swedish painting was increasingly attentive to mood, dusk, and the poetic potential of low light. In broader Scandinavian art discourse, twilight painting had become a key vehicle for expressing an experience often described as characteristically northern: long evenings, luminous nights, and the psychological suggestiveness of half light. Mot Wester belongs to this tradition, but it does so with a distinctive discipline. The work is intimate in material yet ambitious in atmospheric reach, compressing a vast sensation into a modest, carefully organised surface.

Sundblad’s artistic circle further sharpens the significance of this sheet. During his time in France, he moved in close proximity to Ivar Arosenius, who made a portrait of him in Paris in 1904 that is associated with Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde. That portrait is often cited not only as a document of friendship but as evidence that Sundblad belonged to the most vivid network of Swedish artists at the turn of the century. On returning to Sweden he entered the group of Uppsala artists who gathered at Håga and nearby sites, developing a local counterpart to continental artist colonies and engaging with graphic and literary models from German periodical culture.

In a letter dated 27 November 1906, written from Aspeboda and addressed to Carl Edward Berggren, Sundblad describes days moving slowly in the countryside and notes that it had at times been so dark that work was impossible. He simultaneously expresses a longing for urban culture and companionship, and a commitment to return to his working environment in Arbrå, where a studio had been built for him and where much of his mature landscape production took shape. A postcard written the previous year by John Bauer, while lodging with Sundblad in Stockholm, similarly registers the lived conditions of artistic work in winter: the city’s dim museum interiors, the difficulties of study, and the social reality of shared spaces and mutual support.

Seen against this backdrop, Mot Wester can be read as more than a landscape view. It becomes a condensation of circumstance: a young artist, often constrained by fragile health, balancing isolation and community, city and countryside, ambition and limitation. The technical choice of mixed media on coloured paper, the compositional insistence on sky, and the subject’s winter clarity together create an image that is both sensorial and symbolic. One feels the cold in the thinness of the light, and one senses the evening’s hush in the way the forms are simplified into quiet, enduring bands. The work’s modest means are therefore inseparable from its force. Mot Wester stands as a lyrical and sustained vision of northern dusk, made precise through discipline, and made memorable through atmosphere.