Richard Bergh
The voice of mood painting and the Opponents.
Richard Bergh was one of the Opponents and later director of the Nationalmuseum. He painted portraits and charged, still landscapes in the National Romantic spirit of the 1890s.
Richard Bergh was born in 1858 in Stockholm. His father, Edvard Bergh, was an admired landscape painter and professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, so Richard grew up at the heart of the art world. He studied at the Academy around 1880 and then travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by modern, realist painting.
Bergh became one of the most important voices of the Opponents. He was an incisive writer and polemicist and formulated many of the movement’s ideas in articles and books. He helped found the Artists’ Association and held a leading role in it for many years. He argued that art should express the artist’s inner life and not merely depict reality, an idea that foreshadows Symbolism.
As a painter he became known above all for his portraits. His portrait of Ellen Key from 1891 and of August Strindberg from 1905 show his ability to capture a personality. Hypnotic Séance of 1887 is an early attempt to depict a psychological state in painting. These works are in the Nationalmuseum.
During his years in Varberg in the 1890s, together with Karl Nordström and Nils Kreuger, he developed an atmospheric landscape painting. His best-known picture is Nordic Summer Evening of 1899–1900, in which a man and a woman stand in silence on a veranda in the bright summer light. The painting belongs to the Gothenburg Museum of Art and has become a symbol of Nordic mood painting of the 1890s.
In 1915 Bergh became superintendent, that is director, of the Nationalmuseum. He modernised the museum and opened it more to contemporary art. He died in 1919. He is remembered both as a painter and as one of the great organisers and thinkers of Swedish art around the turn of the century.