Spring Ploughing

Spring Ploughing

1884

Oil on canvas

Mått 138,00 x 176,50 cm Ram 163,50 x 201,50 cm

F 54

Bequest of Pontus and Göthilda Fürstenberg, 1902

From the book “The Collection: The Gothenburg Museum of Art”, Gothenburg 2014: Nils Kreuger is known for his evocative twilight landscapes with grazing horses and cows. He was a committed plein-air painter, who liked to paint overcast, rainy weather with Impressionistic effects, having been influenced by contemporary French styles. During his time in France, Kreuger painted the delicate Spring Ploughing. A farmer bends to his work, ploughing the reddish-brown earth behind a workhorse, whose white breath stands out against the darker background. The horizon is located high in the picture and cuts diagonally across the pictorial space. From the foreground, where a straggly pile of dry vegetation has been set alight, smoke rises towards the upper left-hand corner. The painting shows Naturalism’s concern with depicting the daily grind, but equally it is an evocative depiction of light. Both motif and style bring to mind the Realist chronicler of peasant life, Jules Bastien-Lepage, but there is also an emphasis on form and an asymmetry in the composition that are reminiscent of the Japanese woodcuts that were then attracting attention in artistic circles. They give the painting a modern, frank expression, as if taken from a photograph. Kristoffer Arvidsson

Paris, Société des Artistes Français, Palais de Champs Elysées, 1884

Georg Pauli, "Fürstenbergska galleriet. Spridda drag ur dess historia", Ord & Bild, 1902, p. 343 Georg Nordensvan, "I Göteborgs Museum. Några intryck af Georg Nordensvan", Ord & Bild, red. Karl Whålin, Ord & Bild/Wahlström & Widstrand, 1906, p. 27, ill. p. 29 Georg Nordensvan, Svensk konst och svenska konstnärer i nittonde århundradet. II. Från Karl XV till sekelslutet, Ny, grundligt omarbetad upplaga, Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm (1925) 1928, p. 288-289, 311 Maria Görts, Det sköna i verklighetens värld. Akademisk konstsyn i Sverige under senare delen av 1800-talet, diss. Stockholms universitet 1999, Typsnittsarna Prepress, Bjärnum 1999, ill. p. 176 Sixten Strömbom, Konstnärsförbundets historia till och med 1890, Albert Bonniers förlag, Stockholm 1945, p. 179, 181, ill. p. färgplansch VII Michelle Facos, Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination. Swedish Art of the 1890s, University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles, London 1998, p. 58-59, ill. p. fig. 25, 58 Tortsen Gunnarsson, Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century, Yale University Press, New Haven och London 1998, p. 161, ill. p. 161 Axel L. Romdahl, Konstmonologer i Göteborgs Museum, P. A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, Stockholm (1911) 1921, p. 61, ill. p. 61 Alexandra Herlitz, Grez-sur-Loing Revisited: The International Artists' Colony in a Different Light, diss. Göteborgs universitet 2013, Makadam, Göteborg och Stockholm 2013., p. 263, 267 Kristoffer Arvidsson, Per Dahlström, Björn Fredlund, Anna Hyltze, Philippa Nanfeldt, Isabella Nilsson, Johan Sjöström, Samlingen Göteborgs konstmuseum, red. Kristoffer Arvidsson, Per Dahlström, Anna Hyltze, Göteborgs konstmuseum, Göteborg 2014., p. 154, 224-225, ill. p. 154-155