725. CHARLOTTE WAHLSTRÖM. Arable land in autumn.

Oil on canvas 80 x 50 cm. Signed Charlotte Wahlström.

Provenance
Works from the artist's family's collection, some of which were acquired through inheritance from the artist, while others have been acquired through purchase.

Stockholms Auktionsverk has the privilege of presenting a significant collection of the work of landscape painter Charlotte Wahlström, who has already been described as one of Sweden's foremost landscape painters during her time. Her painting is representative of the artistic currents, and the world of ideas that characterizes the first part of the 20th century. She is furthermore very much still, through her experimental nature and close contact with landscape, an important forerunner to many other depictions of nature.

Wahlström was born in 1849 in Svärta Parish outside Nyköping to a sister group of four. The home was bourgeois and the father, Anders Peter was a builder. When she was ten years old, the family suffered a great tragedy, when both the mother, Carolina Wilhelmina, and the youngest sister Hildegard Olivia passed away. Just two years later, the sisters also lost their just-remarried father. The sisters split up in 1870, and Charlotte ended up as a twenty-year-old in Söderhamn where she got a job as a drawing teacher.

A new chapter in Wahlström's life began when, at the age of 28, she went to Stockholm to begin her artistic studies at the Technical School. There it took only a year before she entered the Fruntimmersdepartment at the Academy of Fine Arts. Through her choice of landscape painting as a direction, she met Elisabeth Warling who would become her close friend for life. Landscape would remain Wahlström's primary choice of subject matter and over time the depictions would grow into a vocation. In her long stays in nature, with her eye for its changing hues, expressions and moods, she felt most at home.

Wahlström's painting was already praised during her teaching time through awards and scholarships. Among these should be mentioned the Royal Medal which she was awarded in 1882. The scholarships took her to the destination where her fellow students also looked, to the metropolis of Paris and the surrounding area. She went to the restive capital for the first time in 1885 and then stayed for a couple of months. In the city there were already many Swedish artists who enjoyed the new inspiring environment, socialized in the rich café life and were extensively taught at private painting schools. Wahlström, on the other hand, studied on his own from a master's degree in the Louvre, but above all by practising landscape painting in Barbizon, on the edge of the Fontainebleaus forest south of Paris. It was from here, in the Barbison School, that the representatives Jean- Baptiste Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau and Jean François Millet had introduced the realist landscape painting.

Thus, in France, landscape painting had been dominated by realism, prompting Impressionism. In the 1890s, and the years around the turn of the 20th century, when many Swedish artists returned home to apply their art to their native landscapes and weather patterns, painting became something new and unique. The views, which are part of what we know today as National Romanticism, took firm hold of dawn and evening lights and were loaded with more lyrical, evocative postures. The emotive undertones also gave voice to the arrival of symbolism in the country. Artists who became leaders in this mood painting are Prince Eugen, Richard Bergh, and Karl Nordström.

The space for emotional expression and undertones suited Wahlström's painting and character, and it was thus in her home country that her painting would flourish. Wahlström was of an itinerant nature but returned frequently to a number of places, all with their own character.
In the vicinity of Edeby, where her sister Emilie now lived with her family, she repeatedly depicted various natural cuts in the plains surrounding the farm. Here the viewer gets to see up close the open gentle plains, the rough damp field and a soothing twilight light around the farm houses.

Wahlström's paintings from the Kulla Peninsula have been particularly highlighted for their nature lyrical character. Many artists of her generation sought out here and met mainly in Arild. In Wahlström's motif from the small town at the foot of the steep coast of Kullaberg, flowering perennial heather heaths take center stage. In the contrast of the colourful moor to the barren, dark silhouette of the mountain, the mood is captivating. From locations further into Skälderviken, she depicted beautiful, still cloud formations and the changing movements of the wave playing.

Wahlström went to Ängelsberg in Bergslagen, which was a more northerly connection point for landscape painters, for a number of summers. In her motifs from the ancient forest, full of streams and rocks, the swirling glow of sunlight and the blossoming crowns of fruit trees are depicted. These bright eye-catchers give in her motifs a beautiful almost raised effect in their contrast to the enchanting forest. Wahlström also spent two summers in Dalarna, where she painted similar motifs at Siljan and Dalälven. She also reproduced environments from Värmdö, the Kolmårds forests and the coasts of Halmstad and Falsterbo.
In his landscape painting Wahlström was experimental and used different techniques based on need and desire. With a precise brushwork she gave shimmering light to the rays of the sunset, with denomination painting she created impactful shades for vegetation, and with her palette knife she gave friction to mountains and foundations.

Her name was widely circulated and recognized, and in 1911, when she was awarded the grand prize of the magazine “Idun”, her artist colleague and friend Alice Nordin writes a recognition and reverent portrait of her in which she describes a straightforwardness and Wahlström's close relationship with nature:

“She loves Sweden's nature very much and in order to be able to portray it as she sees it, she has worked more and more intensively and carefully to perfect her technique. She has lived in nature, with nature - for a good part of the year she lives out in the countryside - she has come to know all these different moods. and remarried them in his good and honest way. Truth she says, honesty, that's the best she knows. Honesty to herself I would say, for her art is far from all anxious copying. She looks at nature with a deeply understanding and poetic gaze, which gives grandeur to perception and often lends poetry to her creations.” Idun No. 11 1911. p. 10.

In our own time, when awareness of nature's beneficial effect on our peace of mind is universal, Charlotte Wahlström's landscape paintings are both seductive and touching. Nordin's descriptions of her poetic gaze and honesty can hardly be surpassed, if only by her own sensual experience of her so immensely beautiful work.