Anshelm Schultzberg - Motif from Sunnansjö, Dalarna, 1894

Anshelm Schultzberg (1862–1945) Sweden

Motif from Sunnansjö, Dalarna, 1894

signed and dated lower left Schultzberg 1894, Sunnansjö
oil on panel, mounted on Masonite
unframed 27 × 35 cm (10.6 × 13.8 in)
framed 37 × 45 cm (14.6 × 17.7 in)

Provenance
A gift from the artist to his friend Sven Kjellström (1875–1950), Swedish violist, according to the artist's dedication on the painting;
Private collection, Sweden.

Condition Report:
Recently professionally conserved. The painting is in very good condition with a stable paint surface and clear, well preserved colours.

Essay:
Painted in 1894, Sunnansjö is an unusually intimate early work by Anshelm Schultzberg, created when the artist was only thirty two years old and still establishing the artistic language that would eventually make him one of Sweden's best known landscape painters around the turn of the twentieth century.

The motif is identified by the artist himself as Sunnansjö, a village in Dalarna situated in the landscape around Lake Väsman and the waterways west of Ludvika. Rather than presenting the picturesque buildings or cultivated countryside of the village, Schultzberg turns his attention toward the landscape itself. A dark mountain ridge stretches across the horizon, separating the broad sky from the quiet water and low lying terrain below.

The simplicity of the composition is striking. There are no figures, buildings or narrative elements. Instead, Schultzberg reduces the landscape to horizontal bands of earth, water, mountain and sky. This gives the small panel an unexpectedly modern quality. Seen from a distance, the individual elements almost dissolve into areas of colour, while closer inspection reveals the subtle variations of the painter's brushwork.

Schultzberg had received his artistic education at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm before continuing his development through extensive travel abroad. Like many ambitious Scandinavian painters of his generation, he travelled to continental Europe and spent important periods in France and Italy, where contemporary approaches to plein air painting and atmospheric landscape broadened his artistic vocabulary. He also encountered the increasingly international naturalist movement that was transforming Nordic landscape painting during the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Upon returning to Sweden, Schultzberg increasingly devoted himself to the landscape of his native country. He travelled extensively and developed a particular sensitivity to seasonal and atmospheric effects. Winter eventually became one of his most celebrated subjects, and his brilliantly observed snow landscapes established his reputation both in Sweden and internationally. His work was shown at major exhibitions in Sweden and abroad, and he became an important representative of Swedish landscape painting during the decades around 1900.

Sunnansjö, however, predates many of the mature winter landscapes for which Schultzberg became famous. This is part of what makes the painting particularly interesting. It reveals the young artist experimenting with atmosphere, reflected light and radical compositional simplicity before these concerns became fully established within his mature production.