Bilden av Hälsingegården - Från Düsseldorfmåleri till pixelkonst

Sammanfattning: This essay examines the ways the decorated farmhouses known as hälsingegårdar of Hälsingland, Sweden, are depicted in art from the late nineteenth century Düsseldorf school of painting to contemporary pixel art and how the ways of depiction have changed over time. Three different works of art are analyzed with Erwin Panofsky’s model for iconographic and iconological analysis. Results show a gradual difference in technique and the artist's personal attitudes towards the hälsingegårdar. Starting with the genre painting’s idyllic interpretation of the peasant life as the height of nationalist values to the more provincialist cherry-picking of the late twentieth century naive painting and the final contemporary pixel art piece of ambivalence and distancing from the hälsingegårdar as a means of interpretation and understanding.