Amid our ever-increasing worry about climate change, the clear-cutting of forests, fracking, and the extractionist economic imperium that threatens our survival, it was a pleasure to encounter the beguiling exhibition “The Trees, Light Green: Landscape Painting—Past and Present,” curated by Theodor Ringborg, which paired contemporary Swedish nature painting with the genre’s development in Sweden at the time of the second Industrial Revolution; that is, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The exhibition implicitly proposed that Swedish landscape painting in this crucial