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Carl Fredrik Hill
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The artist Carl Fredrik Hill was born in
1849 in an academic home in Lund, Sweden. His father Carl Johan
Hill, a mathematics professor, was a well-known original. In spite
of his father’s reluctant attitude, Carl Fredrik enters the
Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where after he goes to
Paris in 1873. There Hill works intensively during four years, with
the aim of exhibiting at the Salon in Paris and the Exhibition Universelle
in Philadelphia.
Hill had high ambitions. "My aspiration
drives me to overwork myself and gives me no peace, since I am afraid
of dying before I have finished my work," he says. However,
Hill´s paintings are rejected over and over again, and only
two of them are accepted at the Salon and the Exhibition Universelle.
During a short period of time Hill is hit by a series of disasters.
A skylight window falls over his face, and his favorite sister Anna
dies. Shortly afterwards Hill´s father dies too.
In the following years Hill paints in an
ever-increasing tempo. At the same time he gets more and more emotionally
unstable. The neighbors complain about Hill crying at night. When
his friends are visiting him in January 1878, they are shocked from
pictures with obscene motifs painted in Paris blue and cadmium yellow.
Hill is brought to a lunatic asylum, where the doctor establishes
that he suffers from hallucinations and persecution mania. Afterwards
Hill has got the diagnosis schizophrenia.
 Later
Hill comes to the asylum in Lund, which is today the asylum of St
Lars. However, he objects to the treatment consisting of starvation
cures and cold water. Hill is sent home, where his mother and sister
take care of him for almost 28 years, until his death in 1911.
Right: "Waterfall
with deer", color chalk, reproduced with permission from the
Swedish National Gallery (click on the picture for larger image).
Carl Fredrik Hill is one of Sweden´s
foremost landscape painters through the ages. During his time in
France Hill created an imposing number of pictures  of
great beauty, originality and expressiveness, inspired by among
others Corot. Among these paintings are the famous blossom fruit
trees. After his being taken ill Hill continued to draw thousands
of pictures, but they were highly changed. In imaginative landscapes
he mixes an inner dream world with impressions from illustrated
books and magazines. Hill also composed a strange poem called the
great Verse Manuscript, where he manifests megalomania and delusions
of persecution. Hostile attacks from the surrounding world are treated
with scorn and contempt. According to the Swedish art historian
Nils Lindhagen Hill´s pictures and writings from his ill period
are permeated with an idea of salvation. With the help of creating,
Hill tries to relieve himself from the captivity of insanity in
a magic way.
Above: "Profet
i Urtidslandskap", charcoal, reproduced
with permission from the Swedish National Gallery (click on the
picture for larger image).
Hill got famous only after his death, and
the works from his healthy period attracted attention in the first
place. Later Gunnar Ekelöf and several other Swedish poets
played an essential role for the reassessment of the art from Hill´s
ill period. Just like in the case of Ernst Josephson this art became
an important source of inspiration to the artists of Modernism.
Literature:
Adolf Anderberg. Carl Hill. Hans liv och konst. 1951
Erik Blomberg. Carl Fredrik Hill: Hans friska och sjuka konst. 1949
Börje Cronholm. Schizofrena konstnärer. Nytt och Nyttigt
nr 3 1958
Nils Lindhagen. Carl Fredrik Hill: Sjukdomsårens konst. 1976
Nils Lindhagen. Hill skaldar. Carl Fredrik Hill i dikter och bilder
valda och kommenterade av Nils Lindhagen. 1980
Nationalmuseum Stockholm. Exhibition catalogue 1999
Sten Åke Nilsson. Hillefanten. 1977
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