Nordic Summer Evening
A man and a woman on a veranda, silent before a lake landscape in evening light. The picture has become a symbol of Swedish mood painting and National Romanticism in the 1890s.
The distance between the two – and the still water – carry the mood more than anything that happens.
Richard Bergh painted Nordic Summer Evening around 1900. He was one of the leaders of the Artists’ Association, the group formed by the Opponents to challenge the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Bergh was also an incisive writer on art and later became director of the Nationalmuseum. The painting belongs to the Gothenburg Museum of Art. He was the son of the landscape painter Edvard Bergh and in the 1890s worked closely with Karl Nordström and Nils Kreuger, a circle usually known as the Varberg School. Bergh is also known for his portraits, including those of Ellen Key and August Strindberg.
The picture shows a man and a woman on a veranda on a light summer evening. Behind them stretches a lake landscape with water, wooded shores and a pale sky. The woman stands leaning against the railing, the man stands a little way from her. They do not look directly at each other, and they do not speak. The only thing happening is the evening passing.
The composition is carefully balanced. The railing and pillars of the veranda divide the picture and create a space between the two figures. The distance between them is as important as the figures themselves. The landscape in the background is broad and still and gives the picture its calm.
The light is that of the Nordic summer night, when the sun barely sets. The colours are cool and muted: bluish-grey water, a pale sky and dark passages in the woods and on the veranda. The soft, diffuse light means there are no hard shadows. Everything seems suspended in a still, almost unreal twilight.
The painting is executed in oil on canvas. Bergh worked on it for a long time, and preliminary studies for it exist. He was more meticulous and linear than Zorn, for example, and the figures are clearly modelled.
Nordic Summer Evening is regarded as one of the key works of Swedish mood painting. It is not about a story but about a feeling: expectation, longing or an unspoken understanding between two people in a light typical of the North. Bergh himself wrote about the importance of art expressing moods, and he saw landscape as a mirror of the inner life. Exactly what the relationship between the man and the woman is, the viewer must decide. The title is telling. It singles out the light and the mood as typically Nordic, so that the picture becomes more than a portrait of two people. It becomes an image of the Nordic summer itself.
The painting has often been used as a symbol of National Romanticism and of Swedish art in the 1890s. It has been shown in many exhibitions of Nordic painting, and it is one of the best-known pictures in the collection of the Gothenburg Museum of Art, where Swedish art from the turn of the century has a central place.