See the Breathtaking Landscape Paintings Inspired by the Boreal Forest, From Europe to North America
Titled “Northern Lights,” a new exhibition in Switzerland showcases artworks of the taiga made between 1888 and 1937
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What do the landscape painters of Canada and northern Europe have in common? Their muse is the taiga, or boreal forest: a massive ring of mostly coniferous trees that stretches across the Northern Hemisphere.
In the late 19th century, Swedish artist Gustaf Fjaestad painted his home country’s pine forests laden with snow. In 1900, Norwegian painter Edvard Munch depicted wintry trees lining a fjord in his native Norway. In 1914, English-Canadian artist J.E.H. MacDonald depicted similar forests in Ontario’s Algonquin Park.
As demonstrated by a new exhibition in Switzerland, each of these artists was inspired by the “spiritual landscape” of the boreal forest. “Northern Lights,” now open at the Beyeler Foundation, features 74 landscape paintings by Scandinavian and Canadian artists, all made between 1888 and 1937.
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“These artists all share the nature of the north,” says the museum in a statement. “The seemingly boundless expanses of the forest, the radiant light of endless summer days, the long winter nights and natural phenomena such as the northern lights gave rise to a specifically Nordic form of modern painting that exerts enduring appeal and fascination.”
Common motifs include windswept lakes and sea inlets, which “supply a horizontal contrast to the vertical trees of the forest and make the wind visible as it continually disturbs the water’s surface.” Light is also an influential theme—whether it be oppressive winter darkness, bright summer days or the colorful aurora borealis illuminating the sky, formed by electrically charged particles from the sun colliding with the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Artists perceived these natural phenomena not only as pictorial motifs but as a vital force that significantly influenced their work,” per the museum. “They thus not only captured what they saw, but also gave form to emotional experiences that transport the viewer into the vastness of the boreal forest and inspire reflection on the relationship between man and nature.”
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Canada has a particularly rich history of landscape painting. In the 1920s and early ’30s, leading Canadian landscape painters formed the Algonquin School, or the Group of Seven. They aimed to develop a distinctive artistic style through direct contact with nature, and some consider their work to be Canada’s first internationally recognized art movement. “Northern Lights” features two of the seven, MacDonald and Lawren S. Harris, as well as two artists often associated with the group, Tom Thomson of Ontario and Emily Carr of British Columbia.
As the Financial Times’ Jackie Wullschläger writes, Carr’s dynamic forest paintings shown in the exhibition “set the mind spinning, as if wind tears through the room.” Carr was an environmentalist who painted the Pacific regions of Canada, using oil paint diluted with gasoline to depict “Earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice,” as the artist wrote. “I wanted her volume and I wanted to hear her throb.”
Far to the east and a few decades earlier, Russian artist Ivan Shishkin drew Wind Fallen Trees (1888) in charcoal, and Finland’s Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted the icy Mantykoski Waterfall (1892-94). Another Gallen-Kallela painting on display is Lair of the Lynx (1908), which shows a Finnish region bordering Russia, per the Financial Times. Though they were depicting the same forest, Gallen-Kallela was attempting to make distinctively Finnish art on his side of the border, while Shishkin, also known as the “tsar of the forest,” said his landscapes portrayed “Russian wealth.”
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To accompany the paintings in “Northern Lights,” the Beyeler Foundation commissioned a digital installation by contemporary Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, who’s known for his virtual reality animations. His piece Boreal Dreams focuses on how climate change has affected the taiga, “by conceiving virtual worlds based on scientific data collected through fieldwork and on gaming technology,” according to the museum.
The boreal is one of Earth’s largest old-growth forests, and each artwork in “Northern Lights” attempts to portray the majesty of one of its varied landscapes. Artist Harald Sohlberg, for instance, painted the sublime Rondane mountains in Norway in Country Road (1916) and Winter Night in the Mountains (1901). The artist once wrote of his time in those highlands, “The longer I stood gazing at the scene the more I seemed to feel what a solitary pitiful atom I was in an endless universe.”
“Northern Lights” is on view at the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen, Switzerland, through May 25, 2025.
