Apple Tree in Blossom

The canvas is a study of early summer light: an apple tree in full blossom, the branches loaded with white and the ground beneath it moving into shade. Carl Fredrik Hill was in France between 1873 and 1877, the most productive years of his short working life, and he moved from place to place across the north of the country looking for motifs in which he could follow the shifting light and what it did to the natural world. Blossoming fruit trees were a favourite subject among the Swedish painters who went to France to work out of doors, and Hill treats the tree the way a painter of that school would: as a mass of colour and light rather than a botanical specimen. The museum’s own account of the picture points to exactly that plein-air origin for its brightness. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.