NORDSTRÖM, Karl Fredrik - b. 1855 Stenkyrka, Västra Götalan, d. 1923 Drottningholm

Swedish painter. Between 1875 and 1878 Nordström studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm and the private painting school of Edvard Perseus (1841-1890). Traveling to Paris in 1881, he was influenced by the Impressionists. From 1882 to 1886 he lived in Grèz-sur-Loing, a centre of Impressionist plein-air painting south-east of Paris, the site of an important colony of Scandinavian artists. Here he met Larsson and Krohg. At first he was influenced by the Barbizon school and Bastien-Lepage, then turned to Impressionism.

In 1885, he joined the group of young artists protesting against the policies and leadership of the Academy, and he was ever since 1886 one of the leading members of Konstnärsförbundet, the formalization of the opposition group. He was its chairman from 1896 until its dissolution in 1920.

In 1886, he married xylographer and photographer Tekla Lindeström in Paris. Later the same year, he returned to Scandinavia and painted Swedish winter landscapes. One of Nordström’s old friends from the time at the Academy and in Perseus’ school, Nils Kreuger, had lived in the city of Varberg since 1888. He convinced Nordström to move there in 1892, and they were joined by another of their old friends, Richard Bergh, in 1893. He renewed his acquaintance with the work of Gauguin in Copenhagen in 1892, and with works by van Gogh, exhibited there the next year. His landscapes from Varberg and the Halland countryside were often characterized by the warm sunlight of dawn or dusk or the light Nordic summer nights and a progressively more synthetist style.

In 1893-95, in Varberg, he founded with Bergh and Kreuger the Varberg school, an association of Swedish Symbolists. From 1910 his palette brightened and he turned increasingly to drawing.

A Clearing in the Woods at Grèz

Around 1870, growing numbers of Scandinavian (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish) artists took to visiting Paris, the modern metropolis with its many-sided art scene. They attended the school of L�on Bonnat, or the Acad�mie Julian, or the Acad�mie Colarossi. Some of them were tutored by Jean-L�on G�r�me. When summer arrived and tuition ceased at the private schools in Paris, the artists deserted the city. The coast of Brittany was especially popular for painting holidays. In the 1880s, there was a Swedish artists’ colony at Gr�z-sur-Loing, by the Fontainebleau woods.

In his first summer working at Gr�z, Nordstr�m was totally under the influence of the seventh Impressionist exhibition. A Clearing in the Woods at Gr�z does not seem fully committed to Impressionist technique,though; the filigree of the slender tree trunks retains a linear clarity. The leafage and ground, on the other hand, are a shimmering fabric of green, blue and ochre brush strokes such as might satisfy even the most orthodox Impressionists. The female figure near the point where the path vanishes may seem to have been positioned by chance, but in fact she has her specific spatial and narrative part to play in the overall composition.