Oil on panel, 24.5 x 23 cm, including frame 32 x 30.5 cm. Signed Linnqvist. Executed in 1919.
According to a label on the reverse, the motif is based on the novel "Drottningens juvelsmycke" by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist.
PROVENANCE
Sculptor Ph.D. Ivar Johnsson.
Director Carl-Erik Björkegren.
Private Swedish collection.
EXHIBITED
Kunstnernes hus, Oslo, 1954, cat. no. 11.
Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm, the jubilee exhibition "Svensk konstkavalkad", 1956, cat. no. 209.
Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm, "Hilding Linnqvist", 28 September - 27 October 1957.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, "Hilding Linnqvist", 26 December 1986 - 22 February 1987, cat. no. 26.
Riksförbundet för bildande konst, exhibition 70.
LITERATURE
Konst i svenska hem, part 1:2, Gothenburg 1942, listed and illustrated in black and white under collection no. 670, sculptor Ivar Johnsson, p. 397.
Compare with Bo Lagercrantz, Hilding Linnqvist, 1986, p. 35.
Compare with catalogue "Hilding Linnqvist, Resa, dikt och dröm", Leksands Konstmuseum, 2008, p. 23.
The dream of the enigmatic: A key work from the birth of lyrical naivism.
A closed courtyard opens up like a stage in the twilight. The light-coloured building in the background – Stafsjö – rises with its illuminated windows, where figures move as if in a quiet play. In front of the house, the garden spreads out in a rich and lively bustle: figures, animals, and details that draw the eye further, from the red carriage in the foreground to the small, almost elusive scenes deeper into the picture. Everything is held together by the blue twilight, a light that is as much a mood as it is a time of day. It is a picture to wander through – where every glance reveals something new.
In 1919, Hilding Linnqvist emerged as one of the truly innovative forces in Swedish painting. He broke with the more rigid ideals of the time and sought a freer, more personal expression where the poetic, imaginative, and sincere were given space. The short but significant period of Swedish naivism, from the mid-1910s to the early 1920s, found in him one of its foremost representatives.
The title and motif are taken from Drottningens juvelsmycke, a part of Törnrosens bok by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist. The novel, which takes place in connection with the assassination of Gustav III in 1792, is considered one of the most distinctive in Swedish literature – a free mixture of prose, drama, and poetry. At its centre is the enigmatic and androgynous figure Tintomara, a character who moves beyond fixed identities and who fascinated Linnqvist throughout his life.
Linnqvist planned to illustrate the entire novel, and the motif recurs in several works from this time. For him, however, it is never a matter of a direct illustration, but rather a free interpretation of the novel's mood. He captures the elusive and ambiguous – the masquerades, the shifts in identity, and the charged atmosphere – and translates it into a pictorial world where reality and fantasy merge.
Literary references are constantly present in Linnqvist's painting. In addition to Almqvist, he was inspired by authors and thinkers such as Erik Johan Stagnelius, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Vilhelm Ekelund. This gave his painting a romantic fundamental chord, where interiors and landscapes are dressed in the garb of fantasy and poetry, and where questions of love, body, and soul are given a symbolic and sometimes esoteric charge.
Drottningens juvelsmycke I belongs to Linnqvist's early and most innovative period and is closely related to a larger version of the same motif from the same year. In this smaller format, there is a condensation of the expression: every detail gains greater weight, every gesture becomes more significant. The composition is carefully constructed, yet the painting is simultaneously free and lively, where figures and rooms are bound together into a rich and cohesive whole. As Bo Lagercrantz has pointed out, this smaller version is characterized by a particular mood: "The other smaller, sketch-like version is softly and carefully brushed. It has a dark, romantic Kolmården mood that brings Albrecht Altdorfer to mind" (Lagercrantz, 1986, p. 35).
Here is much of what came to define Linnqvist's art; the joy of storytelling, the theatrical approach, and the ability to create images that move between the concrete and the dreamed. The motif opens up in layers, like chapters in a larger story, where the figures emerge and disappear in a play between presence and secrecy.
Drottningens juvelsmycke I appears as one of the most concentrated and significant expressions of Linnqvist's early artistry. Here, literature and painting meet in an unusually rich union, where colour, form, and fantasy interact in an image that continues to fascinate and deepen – its own world, enigmatic and alive.
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