As the youngest son of King Oscar II (of Sweden and Norway), becoming an artist was a significant proclamation for the 20 year old Prins Eugen Napoleon Nicholas. He was studied in plein-air landscape painting, and typically favored the dramatic light of the Nordic summer, and its effect on vast landscape compositions. This painting, The Forest (1892), is fairly unique in his oeuvre for its nearness to abstraction. It is one of several paintings of the deep forests in eastern Sweden, where Eugen spent some time in 1892. The density of the woods, with only a few distant stripes of orange sunlight, makes this version the most ominous and majestic of Eugen's paintings of this period. The thin and amply textured trees make for an almost abstract rendering of vertical lines.
The presence of the forest is huge within Nordic folklore; it exists as an important fixture for Nordic identity, which is often closely linked to the intense nature that is their unique landscape and heritage.
References:
Varnedoe, Kirk. Northern Light: Nordic Art at the Turn of the Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Art:
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg.
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