Nils Kreuger is known for his evocative twilight landscapes with grazing horses and cows. He was a committed plein-air painter, who liked to paint overcast, rainy weather with Impressionistic effects, having been influenced by contemporary French styles. During his time in France, Kreuger painted the delicate Spring Ploughing.
A farmer bends to his work, ploughing the reddish-brown earth behind a workhorse, whose white breath stands out against the darker background. The horizon is located high in the picture and cuts diagonally across the pictorial space. From the foreground, where a straggly pile of dry vegetation has been set alight, smoke rises towards the upper left-hand corner. The painting shows Naturalism’s concern with depicting the daily grind, but equally it is an evocative depiction of light. Both motif and style bring to mind the Realist chronicler of peasant life, Jules Bastien-Lepage, but there is also an emphasis on form and an asymmetry in the composition that are reminiscent of the Japanese woodcuts that were then attracting attention in artistic circles. They give the painting a modern, frank expression, as if taken from a photograph.
Kristoffer Arvidsson from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
