Gustavian Art

During the second half of the 18ty century, demand increased for subjects from contemporary settings. The bourgeoisie, with growing purchasing power, wanted to own art that related to lived experiences rather than depicting traditional historical or religious themes.

The foremost Swedish recordist during this period was Pehr Hilleström. His works include depictions of court life in the Gustavian era as well as intimate interiors from middle class homes or servants’ quarters. They are important contemporary records of these interiors and also of the hierarchical division of labour.

Pehr Hilleström’s interior from Gustav III’s dining hall at the Royal Palace is the only known Swedish depiction of an 18th-century royal meal. It blends fidelity to detail with simplification. In the background is Leandro Bassano’s painting The Feast of Anthony and Cleopatra. Seated at the table are the king and queen with the royal family. The court and the diplomatic corps have to stand. The Lord Chamberlain, with his back to us, leads the service.

The Grand Tour – Study Travels

Ever since the Renaissance, princes and aristocrats from northern Europe had gone on educational peregrinations in southern Europe, primarily to the Italian peninsula but also to Paris, combining utility with pleasure.

These “Grand Tours” became more common in the 18th century, partly due to the enormous interest in antiquity unleashed by the excavations at Pompeii.

Tastes and collecting choices were influenced by these travels, and demand grew for art depicting subjects from them as well as from more distant places.

In the second half of the 18th century, Europe was seized with a passion for Italian art. Princes and aristocrats embarked on educational Grand Tours of Italy, with Venice often one of their first ports of call. Soon a market emerged for souvenirs in the form of painted cityscapes –vedute. One of the leading exponents of the genre was Bernardo Bellotto. His painting of the Grand Canal has an almost photographic attention to detail.

Love and Eroticism

Themes such as love and eroticism were frowned upon by the church, Catholic as well as Protestant. Portraying nudity in mythological form gave artists an alibi, but was also about gaining inspiration from ancient sculpture and paintings by the old masters. The subjects were taken from Homer and Ovid, for example.

Despite their occasionally statuesque character, the content of these works featured strong emotions. Women were portrayed either as passive victims or alluring beauties, while men played the role of the hero.

In the spring of 1780 Sergel made this bust of Countess von Höpken, known as one of the three Graces at Gustav III’s court. The reason was the king’s commission for a marble replica of the ancient Venus Callipyge. To everyone’s surprise, the model was not averse to “letting her body and beauteous nudity become the object the entire public’s imagination”, as her head was to replace that of the ancient love goddess.

Swedish and French Portraits

In the 18th century Swedish artists travelled to Paris to study and to forge careers. Alexander Roslin was the most successful. Lorens Pasch the Younger was tutored by him for a few years before returning to Stockholm.

Another of Roslin’s pupils was his relative Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, who was elected to France’s Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1784. Through Gustav III’s agency he was asked to paint Marie-Antoinette’s portrait. This was to Wertmüller’s misfortune, as his competitors slandered him. Despite his good court connections he was forced to leave Paris, and became a farmer in Delaware, USA.

The portrait of Marie-Antoinette with her children in the Trianon park was her gift to Gustav III, who had chosen the artist himself – his way of launching Wertmüller in Paris. Shown at the Salon in 1785, the painting was not well received. The subject exclaimed, “What, is that supposed to be me?” According to the critics, a queen could not be shown with her head on one side. Wertmüller had to adjust the portrait before it could be shipped to Sweden.

Swedish and British Portraits

The Swedish artist Carl Fredrik von Breda studied in London in the 1780s, where his teacher was Joshua Reynolds. The latter’s veneration of the old masters led the way for 18th-century British portraiture in the grand manner, a style characterised by technical virtuosity and emotional grandeur.

Models were often clad in mythological guise and depicted in garden settings. Thomas Gainsborough was the other great exponent of British portrait art. On his return home von Breda became a representative of this style, which superseded the French influence embodied by Wertmüller.

Reynolds developed a portraiture that had something of the splendour of history painting – it became known as the grand manner. Women, most often members of the aristocracy, might be portrayed as ancient goddesses framed by dramatic landscapes. Men were usually rendered with more restraint, in their professional roles yet within a grand setting. In this portrait, however, the tone is a little more intimate.

History Painting

When Gustav III imposed an absolute monarchy he also wanted to use painting for propaganda ends. Not surprising, then, that he engaged a number of artists without any consideration whatsoever of their individual talents or aptitude for history painting.

Pehr Hilleström was more interested in the anecdotal, Elias Martin struggled with figure drawing and Carl Gustaf Pilo never finished the coronation painting.

It was only in Louis Jean Desprez that Gustav III found an artist that suited his temperament. Despite their being contemporaries, the distance from Desprez to he wayward Goya is considerable.

Pilo’s coronation painting was commissioned by Gustav III in 1777 and begun in 1782. The artist has included himself in the scene, to the right, offering fellow artist Elias Martin a pinch of snuff. Pilo’s figures merge into the mysterious space of Stockholm Cathedral, filled with colour and light. The painting, which was never finished, was meant to be hung at Drottningholm, as a companion to Ehrenstrahl’s Coronation of Karl XI.

Hero Worship and Mythology

In the 18th century allegorical, historical and mythological subjects remained the dominant ones in painting. The upper classes were expected to be in the know. These motifs featured regardless of style epoch, but their significance varied.

Rococo application of them made playful and sensual allusions, while Neoclassicism was more solemn.

The gods, heroes and historical figures of antiquity gained renewed force as moral ideals during the second half of the 18th century. Even contemporary portraits and depictions could be imbued with an exalted atmosphere akin to that of ancient stories and myths.

Achilles’ mother, Thetis, feared for her son’s fate. Disguised as a woman, he was hidden among King Lycomedes’ daughters in an attempt to avoid being conscripted to fight the Trojan War. But the cunning Odysseus had learned of his hiding place, and had various gifts presented to the daughters, including some weapons. He then had a battle trumpet played, knowing that a soldier like Achilles would reach for the nearest weapon, and indeed he did.

Picturesque Journeys

The traveller’s gaze changed at the end of the 18th century, becoming increasingly coloured by aesthetic appeal.

This was named the voyage pittoresque, as views recalling 17th-century paintings of pastoral landscapes were especially esteemed. Naples and its surroundings were among the most popular destinations.

Paintings of topographic prospects from such places became a reliable earner for many artists. Idyllic depictions of contemporary popular life were also much in demand.

Wearing traditional costumes, Neapolitans perform a merry folk dance. Vesuvius fumes in the background. Sablet’s depiction seems authentic even if some of the figures look almost like caricatures. He may have been inspired by characters from opera buffa, a type of comic opera. The work was commissioned by Gustav III after his visit to Naples. His hosts, Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina, ensured that he saw such popular entertainments.

Landscape and Occultism

Landscape painting in the 18th century was long a depiction of idylls, showing people at work and often idealising peasant life. Animals, domestic as well as wild, could also be given a prominent place in the paintings.

As the century was ending a shift occurred towards dramatic and occasionally frightening landscapes where humans were conspicuous by their absence. Closely linked to this was a taste for the occult and supernatural. Freemasonry and other secret societies flourished during the late 18th century. This left its marks on visual arts, English gardens, literature and drama.

Over a deep valley hemmed in by steep cliffs, sunlight breaks dramatically through the heavy clouds. Centre stage is a spruce, whose leaning stem shoots up like an arrow, enlivening the composition. Elias Martin spent many years in England, where he was influenced by the emerging genre of Romantic landscape painting, with its appreciation of wild nature. It was an influence that continued to partly shape his landscapes after his return to Sweden.

Sergel as Portraitist

A prominent part of Johan Tobias Sergel’s oeuvre is made up of portraits. He executed no fewer than 40 busts and around 200 portrait medallions.

This is an exceptional achievement, yet it was not something Sergel felt proud of. He confessed to his artist friend Nicolai Abildgaard: “Thus it is people’s vain wish to have their physiognomies reproduced in plaster and marble that provides mw with work.”

Queen Sofia Magdalena was a somewhat idiosyncratic member of the Gustavian court, unwilling to face the full glare of public life. Considering her retiring personality it is not surprising that she was the last member of the royal family, bar Princess Sofia Albertina, to have her portrait done by Sergel in the summer of 1783. The queen had just lost her second son, the seven-month-old Carl Gustaf, and her facial expression betrays great gravity.

Sergel’s Large Sculptures

After only a few years in Rome, Johan Tobias Sergel was ready to create independent works in which he melded his impressions of ancient, Renaissance and Baroque art with detailed nature studies. Sergel abandoned the Rococo, which he called “the execrable French manner”.

From 1770 and over the following nine years he executed a series of monumental sculptures, of which several were in marble. Here Sergel often returned to richly contrasting emotional expression as well as to movement. Nothing must detract from the often charged moment the viewer sees, which was why Sergel eschewed accessories.

The love goddess Venus has sent her son Amor to punish her rival Psyche, but Amor falls in love with the beautiful princess. Psyche is prevented from seeing him, however, and suspects that he is a monster. In the light of an oil lamp she discovers that her sleeping lover is a beautiful youth, but she accidentally splashes oil on him, waking him up. This is the moment captured in the sculpture. The story is one of the Roman author Apuleius’ tales.

Gustav III and Kongl. Museum

Gustav III’s collecting of ancient sculpture picked up after the king’s Italian tour in 1783–1784. Carl Fredrik Fredenheim advised on the purchases, but was never allowed to accompany the king.

Paradoxically, Fredenheim’s career only took off after Gustav III’s death, much thanks to good connections within the regency.

That was why Fredenheim was able, only a few months after the king’s death, to establish a public art museum, named Kongl. Museum. It opened to the public in 1794, by which time Gustav III’s entire collection had been transferred to state ownership.

Pehr Hilleström here depicts the sculpture galleries of the Royal Palace’s Stone Museum. The outer one held the larger and more prestigious ancient sculptures such as the muses and the sleeping Endymion. He can be seen in the foreground, and was compared to Apollo di Belvedere. The inner gallery held portrait busts and a more motley collection of antiques. Hilleström made several versions, of which these two once belonged to Fredenheim’s brother-in-law Filip Bernard Hebbe.

Antiquity as Inspiration

Antiquity as an inspiration for art and architecture was not new to the 18th century, but the interest took a new turn. Subjects from Homer’s The Iliad were unusual in visual art before the middle of the century.

Similarly, notions of the architecture of ancient Greece remained vague until the temples in southern Italy were rediscovered, as well as the ruined cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Neoclassicism’s admiration of antiquity not only nourished an aesthetic revaluation in reaction against the Rococo; it also sought other moral ideals.

Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt, Swedish ambassador to the Italian courts, is shown with Florence’s le Cascine in the background. On his knee is Voltaire’s La mort de César. He contemplates busts of the murdered Julius Caesar and Gustav III. Armfelt fell out of favour after the Swedish king’s death. The painting has a political message, and not unexpectedly it was used as evidence when Armfelt in his absence was sentenced to death for high treason.

The Neoclassical Form

The Rococo lingered in furniture art in Gustavian Sweden. It was only after Gustav III’s 1783–1784 Italian tour that Neoclassicism had a definitive impact.

This was particularly apparent in the interiors of the Royal Palace and the King’s Pavilion at Haga. Louis Masreliez’s seating furniture in the antique Greek style was the most radical expression. Another were table tops of marble samples from Rome, testament to the era’s interest in mineralogy and archaeology.

The fad for fine mahogany furniture finished with French polish spoke of a different source of Neoclassicism – the English influences.

Chairs of this type, with sabre-shaped legs and a strongly curved back, became the height of fashion in Europe in the 1780s. They were inspired by images from ancient vases and reliefs. In Sweden, Louis Masreliez was the first to use this type of chair, in the Grand Salon of Gustav III’s Pavilion at Haga. Here it was known as a senator’s or “Sulla” chair, with reference to the Roman statesman Sulla.

Neo-classicism in the Applied Arts

Travel to Italy from the mid-18th century onwards, increased Swedish artists’ knowledge of classical design. Louis Masreliez and Carl August Ehrensvärd are two examples. Another important source of this reorientation in Sweden was British neo-classicism. This is particularly obvious in the work of Swedish silversmiths, represented by Pehr Zethelius. There was also a direct contact through Sweden’s Andrew Fogelberg, who was active in London.

This pear-shaped tea urn pays homage to ancient Greek amphorae. Made of silver, it was probably crafted in Hans Jacob Hagman’s workshop, but to a design by the client, general admiral Carl August Ehrensvärd. Following travels in Italy 1781-1782, he was a keen advocate of the neoclassical style in Sweden.