Anyway, I don't get it at all... But it's a really nice painting.
Sure is a nice painting. Here is a description of it:
Grindslanten is an oil painting by the Swedish artist August Malmström. The motif is a number of children fighting over a coin that has been thrown to them as a thank you for opening the gate for a passing carriage.
Motive
Grindslanten depicts six children at an open gate on a country road. Four of them are lying on the ground, fighting over a coin that seems to have been thrown from the wagon that disappears into the distance. The children can be divided into four groups: in front of the gatehole are three boys on the road, barefoot, bareheaded and dressed in shorts. To their left is another boy, dressed in shoes and long trousers and with a cap on his head, who has managed to hold himself up and is about to seize the coin. Next to this boy is an open book. The three boys' facial expressions show that they realize that they are about to lose.
To the right of the three boys stands a lone boy who watches the fight with a smile and his hands behind his back. To his right sits a girl on the ground and cries,
Maybe over the basket of spilled red berries that lies next to her.
Paintings of children at a gate were a common motif in the 1800s. British artist William Collins' painting Rustic Civility shows some children opening a gate on the highway for a horseman. Kilian Zoll's painting The Crofters' Children shows a group of children at a gate while a horse-drawn carriage passes.
One painting that Malmström was certainly familiar with was Gustav Brandelius's Children at a Gate, which was shown at the Academy of Fine Arts exhibition in 1866. Just like in Grindslanten, the painting depicts a boy standing in the middle of the road with his hands behind his back and a hat on his head. [1]
Advent
The painting was painted in Rotebro, where Malmström lived in the summers. It is possible that Malmström, with the help of children in Rotebro, arranged the motif at some suitable place. It has sometimes been claimed that the cottage in the background is the now burned down Rotebro inn where Malmström lived,[2] but this is not the case and it is more likely that Malmström painted from the memory of his childhood Östergötland. [3]
Preserved sketches show that Malmström has done a thorough preparatory work. At the Östergötland County Museum there is a so-called composition sketch in which Malmström painted the most important parts of the motif without making details in the painting, such as faces. There are some obvious differences between this sketch and the finished painting, including the lack of the tree standing by the fence, the standing boy partially obscuring the road, and the girl's basket of wild strawberries is not included.[4]
Reception
The painting was exhibited for the first time at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts' exhibition in 1885 and later the same year at an exhibition in Gothenburg. In 1887, a xylographic reproduction was published in the calendar Polstjernan, signed "W. Meyer" (Wilhelm Meyer). Karl Wåhlin said that the painting was "an excellent test of the artist's ability." [5]
Grindslanten has had several owners. In 1910, it was bought by a family who moved to South Africa.
Until 1984, the painting was deposited at the Östergötland County Museum, but the owner decided to sell the painting at the auction house Bukowskis. The director of the county museum managed to collect SEK 500,000 to buy the painting, but it was not even enough for the starting bid of SEK 800,000. [9] In April 1984 it was sold at Bukowskis for SEK 1,075,000 to a hotel owner in Malmö who hung the painting in the foyer of the Garden hotel in Malmö. It was sold in 1990 for SEK 13 million to the merchant Kjell Strandberg in Västerås, who in 1991 sold it to the businessman Roy Gustafsson in Eksjö for an unknown amount. That same year, Grindslanten was sold to Curt Wrigfors for SEK 16 million, who hung the painting in his Per Ekström museum in Mörbylånga. When Wrigfors went bankrupt, it was sold at Bukowskis in 1992 to an anonymous buyer for SEK 2 million. [10]