From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Trees are everywhere in ‘Northern Lights’, a survey of landscape painting from Scandinavia and Canada from the 1880s to the 1930s. The first gallery presents forests in a range of moods and seasons, with paintings by Edvard Munch, Ivan Shishkin, Lawren S. Harris and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Shishkin’s Wind Fallen Trees (1888) is a charcoal grisaille of a storm-torn forest, while Harris’s Beaver Pond (1921) presents a lurid, gothic depiction of evergreens beside an abyssal swamp. If Shishkin’s painting is stark and naturalistic, Harris’s comes across as theatrical. Munch’s Children in the Forest (1901–02), meanwhile, shows figures dwarfed by a gloomy phalanx of trees.
Gallen-Kallela steals the room. In Spring Night a cantaloupe moon sits in a pocket of the tree-lined horizon, shooting a dash of orange across a lake (1914). In the foreground, the artist has scumbled green paint around the branches of a pine, the impasto-ridged surface of the water providing the texture to conjure the spiky fuzz of its needles. As a viewer you feel present in the landscape, and in the presence of an artist who sees, and feels, something remarkable. Frosty Birches (1894), with its lattice of branches supporting delicate whites and greys, achieves the same doubleness: at once a persuasive sense of place and a coherently beautiful painting.
Spring Night (1914), Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Lillehammer Art Museum (deposited by The Savings Bank Foundation DNB). Photo: Camilla Damgård
How do artists negotiate the gap between perception and interpretation? Any landscape will offer a set of brute facts, a phenomenological experience, but to translate that into paint demands both technique and a philosophical filter – theosophy, spiritualism, nationalism, realism. The lyrical naturalism of Helmi Biese, Anna Boberg and Prince Eugen offers one approach, while Gustaf Fjæstad introduces a hint of mystery, or modernism. Winter Evening by a River (1907) is a stunning evocation of a dusk-rippled patch of water between two banks of snow, the darkly flowing river an image of infinite unknowability, while his pointillist technique in Frozen Trees at Dusk (1913) verges on abstraction, showing the influence of French painters such as Paul Signac.
Moonlight (1895), Gustaf Fjæstad. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Hans Thorwid/Nationalmuseum
A large gallery is devoted to nine paintings by Munch, by far the biggest name in the show (not to overlook two perfunctory works by Hilma af Klint). Yet he’s also an outlier. Nature for Munch is not a painter’s wonderland but a backdrop for human turpitude. The Yellow Log (1912) shows a few stripped trees extending precipitously into the background forest, their gangrenous hue a sign of their suffering. Six Emily Carr paintings occupy a gallery adjacent to Munch’s room. There are some parallels between the artists – haunting washes of blues and greens, the forest as a psychological landscape – but does she even belong in the show? Carr worked in the Pacific rainforest, not the boreal, and though she painted the coast with empathy and aplomb, her most controversial work – depictions of First Nations communities – is surely her best. Growing up in Vancouver, I was in awe of Carr, who remains a local hero. In the context of this show, though, I became aware of how she often elides the distinct characteristics of the local flora in favour of generic, tree-like forms and waves of gooey green energy.
A telling juxtaposition animates the final room, which is devoted to Ontarians Tom Thomson, J.E.H. MacDonald and Lawren S. Harris. MacDonald’s Snowbound (1915) shares a wall with Snow Fantasy (c. 1917) by Harris. Snowbound dances with shifting light. The foreground shimmers in a range of blues, greens and pinks, punctuated by a trail of paw prints, and patches of creamy orange dusk flit beneath snow-laden boughs of pine. The word ‘fantasy’ in Harris’s title gives his game away. He seems to strive for something beyond visual experience, to please an audience expecting a certain set of conventions – a ‘fantasy’ of the north. MacDonald places the viewer in a specific time and place; Harris offers the viewer an ornament, even a cliché.
Lake Superior (c 1923), Lawren S. Harris. Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo: AGO; © Family of Lawren S. Harris
Mulling over this tension, I was reminded of Coleridge’s debate with himself in his poem ‘The Nightingale’. The speaker of the poem, sitting on a bridge one evening, hears a nightingale’s song, calling it ‘melancholy’. He then rebukes himself – ‘idle thought’! – and realises he’s lazily indulging a conceit conjured long ago by some lovesick poet who projected his own gloom upon the bird. Better, he suggests a few lines later, to adjust his senses ‘to the influxes / Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements’ of nature. Toss romantic conventions aside, he exhorts, and engage one’s senses instead.
If there is something unique about any landscape – the shapes and shifting elements – then artists ought to attend to that uniqueness. Gallen-Kallela’s Snowy Cliffs at Kalela (1901) depicts a rocky hillside toward the end of winter. Patches of melting snow create seductive arabesques around lichen-covered rocks, while birch and pine branches carve lines through an ethereal blue sky. The Lair of the Lynx (Lokulan) (1908) shows a similar view, a rocky crag blanketed by layers of mid-winter snowfalls, presenting both an accurate depiction of a specific time and place and a meditative abstraction. The artist convincingly translates a small patch of the planet into a beautiful, coherent picture.
Gallen-Kallela’s balance of observation and painterly flair became for me the most eloquent approach in the show. Tom Thomson, master of the well-wrought tree, isn’t far behind. His sketches, painted while batting away biting flies amid the swamps of Algonquin Park, sing with the artist’s reverence for the landscape, and his way with colour, especially cobalt blue, is astonishing. (To be fair to Harris, his smaller works are beautifully observed.) This is not a manifesto – Expressionist landscapes are fantastic things. Carr revels marvellously amid firs and cedars and Munch stands out as a peerless mythmaker, imbuing his landscapes with lust and menace. But the combination of works in the exhibition led me to prefer the artists who cast a sceptical eye, perhaps innocently, on the ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical’ tradition of northern landscape painting. If you want to be transported to the north, it helps to sense the crackle of melting snow, the fugacious light of an evening in spring.
Northern Lights is at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, until 25 May and at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum from 1 August to 12 January 2026.
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.