Carl Fredrik Hill Swedish nationality Born in Lund on May 31st, 1849 Dies in Lund on February 22nd, 1911

Carl Fredrick Hill comes from a rigid and conventional lower middle class family. His authoritarian father is a maths teacher and discourages his son from pursuing his ambition of becoming a painter. The family finally reaches a compromise and Carl Fredrik will study aesthetics at the University of Lund, then will sign up at the Art Academy of Stockholm in 1871. In 1873 he moves to Paris. He paints landscapes inspired by Corot and the painters of the Barbizon School. His father dies in 1875. Carl Fredrik feels liberated from an all-controlling father but can no longer prove to his father his talent as a painter. Moreover, his works are not appreciated. During the year 1877, Hill feels much anxiety prior to his illness. Suffering from repeated hallucinations, he is admitted to the private clinic of Dr. Blanche. In June 1880, his sister has him transferred to the Hospital of Sct.Hans in Roskilde, Denmark. He will stay there for two years after which he returns to Sweden and enters the mental hospital of Sct. Lars. A few months later, his sister decides to take care of him and he will live with her until his death. During the thirty-five years of his illness, and until his death, Carl Fredrik Hill creates a large body of work that is much more interesting that the one he produced before.

Unfortunately, a major part of his work has disappeared. His friends, thinking that these expressionistic drawings could affect his reputation, destroyed most of them. The remainder of his work is kept at the Malmö Museum or in the hands of private collectors. The work of Carl Fredrik Hill is truly disarming: first because he uses different styles, different themes (landscapes, mythological scenes, symbolic compositions) and many different techniques (pen and ink drawings, crayons, colored pencils, gouaches); then because his works are directly based on illustrated books and magazines (Gustave Doré for example). Hill copies from them. He carries out a true cultural revolution by attacking all academic rules as if he were to point at those works he made while at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. This turns into some kind of paradoxical game, a confrontation between his allegiance to the authority he had to comply with and blasphemy, parricide and murder. His work is a battle against his own destiny, the story of castration and at the same time the story of a fight to rebuild an identity first stifled, later destroyed. This is the story of not a very talented painter, crushed by paternal authority, who ends up finding his "freedom" and his creativity at the price of madness. It is really the story of his liberation from a father figure.

SEE ALSO: LINDHAGEN (Nils). Carl Fredrik Hill, Sjukdomsarens konst, Bernces Förlag, Malmö, 1976. LINDHAGEN (Nils). Hill tecknar, Bokförlaget Signum, Lund, 1988.

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