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The Leicester Galleries Ltd
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Medium
Oil on canvas
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Signed/Inscribed/Dated
Signed lower left, inscribed with the title on the frame and inscribed A. Jansson on the stretcher
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Dimensions
104.70cm wide
76.00cm high
(41.22 inches wide 29.92 inches high)
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Provenance
Adrian Jansson, the artist's brother
By descent in the artist's family; to 2007
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Literature:
Wollin, N. G., Eugene Jansson Maleri, Stockholm 1920, catalogue number 75, illustrated page 58
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Exhibition History:
Stockholm, The National Museum, 1948
Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Eugene Jansson 1862-1915, 1998 (ex catalogue)
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Description / Expertise
Throughout his career Jansson was preoccupied with the shifting moods of atmosphere and light of his native city; the blue twilight and the half-light of dawn, articulated by the lamplights and their reflections in the water, were the principal subject of his painting before 1904.
The lonely and melancholic Jansson is unique in Swedish art; no-one else has painted Stockholm with such personal feeling and intensity. When previously many of the artist contemporaries had left Sweden for France, Jansson remained in Stockholm. Those aspects of the Stockholm cityscapes with which Jansson became obsessed, and the relationship of the capital to its open water and outlying archipelago had hitherto been ignored by Swedish painters.
Jansson’s Stockholm paintings are characterised by their sweeping contours, which emphasise the perspective of his views, the use of a deep ultramarine blue, which he thinned with paraffin (thus earning himself the sobriquet ‘paraffin Jansson’), a technique of scraping with palette knife and some spontaneity and vigour of brushwork, all of which combine to give a feeling of abstract form. Eugene Jansson has often been compared with Munch; Jansson had seen and admired Munch’s work during the 1890s. However, the case is one of parallel development rather than any dependence of Jansson upon Munch (1).
1. The Swedish Vision. Landscape and Figurative Painting 1885-1920, Moser & Klang Stockholm at Shepherd Gallery, New York, Fall 1985, New York, 1985, page 112
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