Hugo Carlberg

Hugo Carlberg, Landscape With Lake & Birch Trees, Oil Painting

1918

This early 20th-century expressive landscape painting by Danish artist Julius Paulsen depicts a cottage nestled in the woods. It’s painted quickly with a rhythmical approach and poet...

This charming 19th-century oil painting by Danish artist Christian Berthelsen (1839-1909) depicts a village scene with storks nesting atop a timber-framed dwelling. Is it simply a gentle portrayal of idyllic family life? Or does it allude to a sinister fairy tale by a well-known Danish author? Berthelsen was born on the small picturesque island of Føhr, where most families worked the land and lived in villages peppered with quaint thatched cottages. Amid these rural communities, children became familiar with various folk stories including those told so menacingly by the author Hans Christian Andersen. In 1839, the year Berthelsen was born, Andersen published ‘Storkene’, a typically macabre tale involving a family of storks. It begins: "On the last house...

A beautiful woman sits at an open window, gazing down at a small bird who has landed nearby in this serene portrait by Charles Levier. Warm orange tones are played off their complements in shades of blue, the artist utilizing several different layers of oils to create a subtle and relaxed view of a spring day near the sea. Beyond the window a small chapel sits on a peninsula, surrounded tranquil blue waters. This work, like many of Levier's, belongs to the French figurative movement of the Glorious Thirty (Les Trente Glorieuses) - the golden period of thirty years after WWII which were a time of great hope and prosperity in France. Inspired by Hollywood cinema, Charles Levier sought harmony in composition and purity of color and form. His said that his creations represented "a light and delicate world, of dark and subtle shades and colors." Levier worked in a somewhat abstracted, cubist style. Additionally he often employed the French technique of "cloisonnism" (after the French for "partition"), a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours, also seen in this work. The term was coined by critic Edouard Dujardin on the occasion of the Salon des Indépendants, in March 1888 and was commonly used by artists like Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, Paul...

Oil on canvas