Henrik Lilljebjörn som landskapsmålare

Abstract

Summary Henrik Lilljebjörn (1797–1875) is well‐known for his memoirs of his youth in the province of Värmland in western Sweden. He was an officer in the Värmland Rifles and also trained as a military surveyor. Among his many talents was painting. As a painter he was one of many gifted dilettantes in Swedish military circles of the first half of the 19th century. Hitherto his paintings have hardly received any attention from art historians, even though his works are of great cultural‐historical interest and by no means lacking in artistic value. His motifs were taken from the manorial milieu of western Värmland, where he was brought up, and from the province capital, Karlstad, where he lived as an officer. He was most productive as a portraitist, but his portraits are often difficult to distinguish from the early work by his younger cousin Uno Troili (1815–75), whose first art teacher he was, and who was to become the foremost portrait painter of his generation in Sweden. This article, however, is entirely devoted to Lilljebjörn's youthful landscape paintings from the vicinity of Odenstad, his fathers manor house, and townscapes from Karlstad of the 1850s and 60s. The former are in the romantic tradition and show a certain influence from Carl Johan Fahlcrantz (1774–1861 ), the most famous landscape painter of Swedisch romanticism, whereas his townscapes are more classicizing realistic and display similarities to Danish golden age paintings from the first half of the 19th century, as well as to the views from Helsinki by Magnus von Wright (1805–68). The latter has many features in common with Lilljebjörn. Like him, Magnus von Wright was the son of an officer and landed proprietor, he was almost an autodidact, he had been working as a surveyor, and he shared his time between the countryside and Helsinki, which in 1860 was a small town with 22 000 inhabitants (compared with 4700 in Karlstad). These factors, as well as their distance to the great capitals of art, might explain the very similar, charming but stilistically retarded biedermeier qualities of their art.