For me, what affects me most strongly in Carl Fredrik Hill is the sheer madness and the naïve style. There’s something in his pictures that reminds me of the children’s book Babar the Elephant, which I had when I was a child.

At the age of twenty-nine, in 1878, Carl Fredrik Hill developed an incurable mental illness that continued to affect him for the rest of his life. Before that, he had shown a great talent for Impressionist landscape painting, painting lots of flowering apple trees. But in the later drawings, made during his illness, all boundaries seem to disappear. During his hospitalisation, Hill revisited his old works and copied elements from them. He would take a luminous apple tree and redraw it in black chalk as an abstract form.

His pictures teem with animals, and the elephant holds a special place in them. It turns up again and again. The connection to elephants is underlined by the fact that Hill kept an ivory paper knife on his desk. I was especially taken with a drawing in which the elephant carries its young on its back. It is unlikely that Hill ever saw an elephant in real life; he drew from illustrations in journals and books. Hill had a large library, which included books by Jules Verne, such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Strindberg was fascinated by his work, as were other artists. However, after his illness Hill lived a relatively isolated life in Lund with his family. He was not truly discovered until long after his death in 1911. Not until the 1930s – while Hitler and Goebbels were developing their fascist aesthetic – did interest in his works begin to gather momentum in his homeland, both those made before and after the onset of his illness. These were works that, in Germany, would have ended up in the Nazis’ Entartete Kunst exhibition.