Eugène Jansson: The Blue Painter of Stockholm's Nights
Picture a window high above the water on Stockholm's south side, sometime in the 1890s. Below it the bay of Riddarfjärden turns from violet to ink. Gas lamps come on along the quays one at a time, and every one of them leaves a trembling line of light on the water. Nobody is in the street. At the window, a thin man with weak eyes and a bad heart is painting all of it in shades of blue.
The man was Eugène Jansson, and for about fifteen years he painted almost nothing but this view. His fellow artists called him "blåmålaren", the blue painter. Then he walked away from the subject that had made his name and started over with something far riskier. Few painters of his generation reinvented themselves so completely, and few have been so thoroughly overlooked outside their own country.
A Stockholm Boy Who Never Got to Paris
Jansson was born in Stockholm on 18 March 1862. His family was modest but musical and artistic: his father, a postal messenger, played the flute for pleasure, and his mother painted still lifes as a hobby. At fourteen Eugène caught scarlet fever, and it left him for life with poor eyesight, poor hearing and weak kidneys. It is hard not to think of those damaged eyes when you look at the soft, swimming lights of his later canvases.
He studied at the Tekniska skolan, then at the private school run by the painter Edvard Perséus, and in 1881 he entered the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. In those years an ambitious young Swedish painter was expected to finish his training in Paris. Jansson could not afford it. He did not travel beyond the Nordic countries until 1900, when he was nearly forty.
What he had instead was conviction. He was a committed socialist, part of the rebel circle around Perséus known as the Opponents, who pushed back against the Academy's conservatism. In 1886 he was among the founders of the Konstnärsförbundet, the Artists' Union, and he stayed loyal to it for the rest of his life.
The View from Mariaberget
In 1891 his father died, and Jansson became head of a small household made up of himself, his mother and his younger brother Adrian. They settled on Södermalm and eventually took a flat at Bastugatan 40, on the heights of Mariaberget. From there he looked out over Riddarfjärden towards the old town. That view became his life's work for more than a decade.
The paintings from this period, roughly 1890 to 1904, are mostly night or twilight scenes of the bay and the streets around it. Colleagues also called him "paraffin Jansson", because his blues seemed lit from inside, like a lamp burning in a dark room. In "A Night in May" (1895) the Södermalm waterfront glows under gaslight, and there is not a single person in it. In the great "Riddarfjärden, Stockholm" (1898), now at the Nationalmuseum, the water opens up into a huge blue field crossed by restless, criss-crossing brushstrokes, with the city reduced to a line of dark shapes and pinpricks of light.
You can feel the presence of his heroes in these pictures. Edvard Munch showed in Stockholm in the 1890s, and Jansson knew his work well. There is something of Whistler's nocturnes in the hush, and something of van Gogh in the energetic, visible brushwork. But these are not borrowed paintings. As the decade went on Jansson stripped them down further, until in some late nocturnes there is little left but streetlights and their reflections, floating in colour. They feel closer to the abstraction of the twentieth century than to the polite city views of his own day. And these are not the cheerful boulevards of the Impressionists. They show a city changing fast, with factories, smoke and electric light, and seen from a distance by someone who watches rather than joins in.
The Banker Who Knocked on His Door
For years the blue pictures barely paid. That changed in 1898, when the banker and collector Ernest Thiel came to Jansson's studio on the recommendation of the painter Karl Nordström and bought three canvases on the spot. Thiel became his most important patron. He paid for Jansson's first trips abroad, to Paris in 1900 and to Italy and Germany the following year, and he built up the largest single collection of Jansson's work.
That collection still has a home. Thiel's Art Nouveau villa on Djurgården, designed by Ferdinand Boberg, was acquired by the Swedish state in the 1920s after the banker lost his fortune, and it is now open to the public as Thielska Galleriet. It is one of the best places anywhere to see Jansson's paintings hanging next to those of his friends and contemporaries, Munch among them.
Starting Over at the Navy Bathhouse
Around 1904, just as collectors were finally taking notice, Jansson told a friend he was worn out by his old subject. He stopped exhibiting for several years. His friend Prince Eugen, the painter prince, later recalled Jansson saying that what he had always wanted was to paint the human figure, but that he had never been able to afford models.
The answer came from an unexpected place. Hoping to improve his health, Jansson took up swimming, including bathing in cold water through the winter, at the navy's bathhouse on Skeppsholmen. There he found his new subject: young sailors sunbathing, swimming, doing gymnastics and lifting weights. Many agreed to pose. From 1907 he worked from a studio near the naval buildings, and he showed his first male nudes in public that year.
These are big, bright, strange paintings. "Flottans badhus" (The Navy Bathhouse, 1907), now at Thielska Galleriet, shows bodies stretched out in strong sunlight, all angles and muscle, painted with the same nervous energy that once went into the nocturnes. Later canvases show athletes, acrobats and men swinging on gymnastic rings. They belong to a wider Nordic fashion for "vitalism", a cult of sunlight, fresh air and physical health, but Jansson took it further than anyone. In 1912, while Stockholm hosted the Olympic Games, several of his athlete paintings hung in the Artists' Union exhibition. Years later the writer Tor Hedberg said the male figure had entered Swedish painting "boldly and supremely" through Jansson's work.
What the Letters Might Have Said
Jansson died on 15 June 1915, at fifty-three, of a cerebral haemorrhage. A memorial exhibition followed at Liljevalchs Konsthall in 1918. After his death his brother Adrian burned Eugène's letters and many other papers, perhaps to avoid scandal.
For a long time that silence suited art historians, who said very little about the obvious sensuality of the bathhouse paintings. Homosexuality was a crime in Sweden until 1944. Later research, notably by the art historian Hans Henrik Brummer, concluded that Jansson was probably gay. One of his models, Knut Hyman, whom he painted in "Naked Young Man" (1907), shared his studio until around 1912. Today Jansson is often called Sweden's first openly queer painter. It is a label he could never have used himself, but it helps explain why the second half of his career was set aside for so long.
Why He Is Worth Finding
In recent decades Jansson has slowly returned to view. Liljevalchs gave him a major exhibition in 1998, the Musée d'Orsay followed in 1999, and his canvases have travelled in surveys of Nordic painting around Europe and the United States. Even so, outside Scandinavia he is still mostly a name you stumble on in a gallery corner.
He is worth seeking out precisely because he was two painters in one life. The first sat at a window and watched a city melt into blue. The second went down to the water, took off his coat and painted bodies in full sun. Both were looking for the same thing: a way to make a picture feel alive rather than merely correct. Next time you see a lit window reflected in dark water, it is not a bad moment to remember him.
