Isaac Grünewald Sara in the garden,
oil on panel, 55 x 46 cm, signed Grünewald.

Summer’s Joy, Bloom & Salty Waters
14 June–4 July & 4 August–16 August

Opening hours Mon – Fri 10–18 Sat 12–16

Summer’s joy is a Swedish notion of a summer house, or a vacation hide away, but in this exhibition, it refers not only from the escape from the busy city life to the countryside and the archipelago, but also to what comes alive in the city during summer days; people exploring markets or taking long walks along the waterfront. Geographically, the motifs stretch from the beaches of Åland in Finland, to the popular port of Sandhamn in Sweden and all the way down to Southern France. The exhibition invites to view a wide selection of works, from paintings that represent the Swedish artists that lived and worked in Paris during the 1880s, to the vibrant modernism that was integrated into Swedish art thanks to the Swedish artists that studied under Matisse, such as Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén. While some of the art works in the exhibition fume of a cosmopolitan spirit, others are dedications to Swedish and Nordic nature and light. Many motifs that are on view here breathe what we associate with Swedish and Nordic summer. Among them are works by Oskar Bergman with his distinctive detail in his nature studies in soft and clear colour scales, Roland Svensson with his timeless archipelago paintings, and Maria Wiik's warm depictions of a simple life in the summer sun on the Finnish countryside.

Welcome!

Summer’s Joy, Bloom & Salty Waters

READ THE CATALOGUE HERE (IN SWEDISH)

Selected Works

Isaac Grünewald, Sara in the garden, oil on panel, 55 x 46 cm, signed Grünewald.

Sara in the garden

Isaac Grünewald composed this painting in 1941, and it is most likely a scene from his own garden. The model in this case is not his wife Märta, but a young woman named Sara, who is caught in a moment of reading, while seated in a hammock. The figure is surrounded by green and bloom that almost fills up the image completely. The beauty of the Grünewald family’s garden and the surrounding nature of the archipelago by their villa in Saltsjöbaden, Grünewald found himself inspired to renew his style in a series of oil paintings.

Sigrid Hjertén,Mandolin Players, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, signed Hjertén.

Mandolin Players

Sigrid Hjertén spent the summer of 1927 in le Midi, the area where the regions Aquitaine, Occitanie, and Provence-Côte d´Azur borders to each other in Southern France. Together with her family, her husband Isaac Grünewald and son Ivan, rented a house outside of the coastal town of Toulon in Provence, called Villa Collinière. The artist thrived in this environment that prompt her to paint this lively and colourful scene of a gathering of musicians.To compare, one of Hjerténs examples of staffage painting from Southern France around this period is a motif of French peasants, today part of the collection of Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde. There is such a resemblance between the two paintings that they can without doubt be placed within the same context.

Carl Larsson, Summer Blush watercolor and gouache, 56 x 77.5 cm, signed and dated C. Larsson 1887.

Summer Blush

Carl Larsson painted Summer Blush two years after his move back to Sweden from France, where he had stayed for longer periods during the years 1887-1885. On his return to Sweden, he came almost directly from the village Grez-sur-Loing where he had met his wife Karin and where they both had started to learn from the plein air painting that has become so strongly associated with Grez. This painting resembles Larssons plein air paintings from his stays in the French village, but we are here placed in the lush garden of the summerhouse that the family rented in Apelviken, outside of Varberg on the Swedish West Coast.

Roland Svensson, Little Nassa,Pastellkrita på papper, 27 x 40 cm, signerad roland S.

Little Nassa

The art of Roland Svensson is strongly associated with motifs from the Stockholm archipelago and in his fascination of the island landscape, geology, nature and inhabitants, he places himself into a Swedish tradition of painting represented by artist as Albert Engström, Rickard Lindström and his most esteemed friend and colleague Axel Sjöberg. Svensson, who made studies in plein air, worked in a variation of formats and often used pastels or water colours. Little Nassa is a group of small islands in the outer archipelago to where Svensson made outings to paint its unique waterscape. Svensson had discovered the nature of the island groups Big Nassa and Little Nassa, already in the 1940s.

See the artworks in our online gallery

Summer’s Joy, Bloom & Salty Waters14 June–4 July & 4 August–16 August