Farmhouses of Hälsingland - Architecture and decoration

Back

What wall paintings might look like in an old Hälsingland farm
Kerstin Sinha, Ljusdalsbygdens Museum

Up in the attic of an old farm in the parish of Ljusdal are great piles of wallpaper, painted with distemper on home-woven linen of different qualities. They are about 1,5 metres high (ca 5 feet) but of varying lengths, some of them almost four metres (ca 13 feet). They have hung on the walls of the various rooms of the 18th century double cottage that was the family's home until 1887. The 19th century scramble for timber in the vast Hälsingland forests brought both cash and new ideas onto the farms: now, houses were to be of two or three storeys with scrolled carpentry-work and long rows of big windows, and above all factory-made, store bought wallpaper. When a new house was built on this farm in 1887, the old double cottage was moved and became the "west cottage", with a room for farm-hands and workshops. The paintings that had decorated the rooms of the double cottage were seen as old-fashioned, and were put up more to keep the draughts out than for their outmoded beauty. But this recycling meant that they were preserved, and they were carefully lifted down when the double cottage was renovated in the 1970s. This allows us to trace something of their history.

A fragment from the centre of the interior tells us that it was painted in 1735.

The motifs - leaves and flowers which swell out of bulging Baroque urns, and sturdy columns wound with vines - are typical of much of the painting of that time in Hälsingland. The blue colour scheme can also be found in paintings in the Ovanåker district, although in the Delsbo area, in north eastern Hälsingland, similar paintings tend more to be black, red and yellow.

The paint has been partly worn away at the base of the urn - this was the part of the distempered wall painting which was most subjected to wear and tear when people sat on the long benches round the walls of the room. Here, we can glimpse a printed 17th century pattern - the 1735 decoration has thus been painted on top of an older, block printed pattern.

Another part of the wall covering was painted on a check-weave cloth – here, we see its reverse. And this is not all: the next time the farm owners decided that some modernisation was necessary – a century later, in the 1830s – they simply turned the old painting to the wall and asked the best painter of that age to decorate the room by painting the figures and shapes of his time.

These were delicate, light decorations in several rooms (below), in the style we have come to call "Ädel-painting", the decorative and unique style of the Ljusdal area. It is named after the soldier and painter Anders Ädel (1809-1888).

In this farm, then, he seems – perhaps with the help of his children? – to have painted several rooms, but as usual without signing the decorations in any way: He was a craftsman, not an artist! On one wall, however, he has painted an open book, a motif seen in several farms in the district. With the help of the writing in it, we can work out that the painting was done between 1833, when "doter Britta" was born, and 1841, when the family´s next child, the son Jonas, was born. Someone has tried to write his name, but given up after the first letter, the S in "Son". It is not easy to paint with distemper, and even harder to write; only a skilled craftsman like Anders Ädel knew how.