Kor i skogsglänta (Cows in a forest glade)

There is no doubt that Hilma af Klint considered the spiritual works, first and foremost The Paintings for the Temple, her most significant achievement. But it is important to point out that throughout her life she returned to the more traditional kind of painting taught at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm where she was a student from 1882 to 1888. The landscape paintings that Hilma af Klint executed over a long period of years clearly demonstrates that she wasn’t an “unworldly recluse”. Julia Voss writes (in [Eds.] Kurt Almqvist & Daniel Birnbaum, Hilma af Klint. Catalogue Raisonné. Landscapes, Portraits and Miscellaneous Works 1877 – 1941, vol. 7):

The works gathered here confront us with a painter who, throughout her life, never lost interest in the physical world in which she lived. Her naturalistic work leads us from the exercises of her student days to landscape paintings in oil on canvas from the years before 1900, to late watercolours from 1931 and 1932 (HaK 1734/1739), in which af Klint captures views of Helsingborg, the city in which she lived at the time. She also painted watercolours of the Hanmora family estate, on the island of Adelsö situated in Lake Mälaren outside Stockholm.

Her earlier landscapes are related to the realist movement of the period, and they show mostly rather harsh, even though sometimes idyllic, Nordic scenes conveyed through a muted palette. Unlike many of her fellow students, Hilma af Klint was not drawn to Paris or the popular French artist’s colony of Grez-sur-Loing, or as Julia Voss puts it:

The emerging Impressionism was hardly reflected in her oeuvre. Cheerful, light-flooded scenes, as seen in the Swedish painters Hanna Hirsch-Pauli and Eva Bonnier, who are almost the same age as af Klint, are rather rare in her work. The bohemian life of urban artistic circles does not seem to have appealed to af Klint, whose interest appears to have been in rural life.

Hilma af Klint captured views of Sweden that stretched from the north (From Jämtland, Åre, undated, ink on paper, 19 x 34.5 cm, p. 126 in Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 7, HaK1643) to the south (Kullen in Skåne, undated, watercolour on paper, 12.5 x 18 cm, p. 198 in Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 7, HaK1218). Mainly, however, it was Stockholm and the adjacent Mälardalen valley that became focal points for her as a landscape painter. Noteworthy examples of the above mentioned would be Stigbergsgatan, south, with Katarina Church (1889, oil on canvas, 33 x 48.5 cm, p. 106 in Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 7, private collection) and Family estate at Tofta, Adelsö (1891, oil on canvas, 13 x 20 cm, p. 116 in Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 7, private collection).

As pointed out by Julia Voss, af Klint, in contrast to her spiritual art, left the landscape part of her oeuvre in a disordered state: “The works are often signed, but rarely dated or given a title. The difference from the titles and numbers which minutely record the exact order of The Paintings for the Temple couldn’t be greater”. The undated Cows in a forest glade depicts a typically Swedish landscape which bears similarities to the elongated, flat scenery in Landscape at sunset (1895, watercolour and gouache on paper mounted on board, 12.5 x 32 cm, p. 103 in Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 7, private collection). Although af Klint also depicted cows in other parts of Sweden, such as Skåne (Spring landscape from Lomma Bay, 1892, oil on canvas, 34.5 x 100 cm, p. 129 in Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 7, private collection), the flora of the landscape with mixed coniferous and deciduous forests indicates that the painting immortalizes an unspecified area of the Mälardalen valley, possibly close to her beloved Adelsö.

Provenance
Gift from Anna Cassel to Anna Bayard in the 1930/40s.
By descent within the same family.
Stockholms Auktionsverk, 20 October 2022, lot 501.
Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above sale).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation