The black spruces

After a severe psychotic attack in Paris 1878 Carl Fredrik Hill was hospitalized at the age of 28, his career as a landscape painter came to an untimely end. This painting is considered to have been painted in 1878 during Hills stay at Dr. Blanche's clinic outside Paris, where he was allowed to paint and draw as soon as his condition had improved. The dark painting has a sad undertone of nostalgia. The warm golden light from Hills earlier time in France is gone. There is a duality in the motif that recurs later in several of his illness drawings. The lower part is still and empty, the top is in violent movement. In this painting, he has returned to the backlit effects from the years 1874-75. The heavy and dark vegetation of firs dominates the foreground against a bright sky.