Seashore at Luc-sur-Mer

Carl Fredrik Hill became one of the most original Swedish landscape painters of his time. Both the Barbizon School and Corot had a decisive influence on him and he spent five years in France during the 1870s. The summer heat got Hill in August 1876 to travel to the Normandy coast and Luc-sur-Mer, located approximately one mil north of the city of Caen. "I paint since a week the Atlantic Ocean, and every time I finished my sketching I bathe in the ocean" wrote Hill in his first letter from Luc-Sur-Mer. The sea, the cliffs, the beach and the sky became his motifs and the paintings from here carries the sketch instant freshness. He was strongly dependent on tidal movements. He painted as he himself describes it "the sea swamp". The weeks on the coast belongs to the artist's happiest periods of his life.