Ernst Josephson
The great outsider of Swedish art.
Ernst Josephson was one of the leaders of the Opponents, who rebelled against the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1885. After a mental breakdown he went on drawing in a free, visionary style.
Ernst Josephson was born in 1851 in Stockholm into a prosperous Jewish family with strong cultural interests. He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts from 1867 until the mid-1870s. He then travelled around Europe studying the old masters, especially Rembrandt and the Venetian painters, whose glowing colour came to shape his own painting.
During his years in Paris and on journeys to Spain he painted Spanish Blacksmiths of 1881, which is now in the Nationalmuseum. His portraits from the 1880s, including that of Jeanette Rubenson, are among the finest in Swedish art. His great dream was The Water Sprite, the spirit who plays the fiddle by the rapids. He painted the subject in several versions during the 1880s, but the Nationalmuseum refused to buy it. Prince Eugen later bought one version, and today the picture is among the best known in Swedish art history.
Josephson became one of the leaders of the Opponents, the young artists who in 1885 protested against the teaching and exhibition policy of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. He was chairman of the Artists’ Association in its first years. The disappointment of not being recognised at home took a heavy toll on him.
In the summer of 1888 he suffered a mental breakdown on the island of Bréhat in Brittany, where he had been practising spiritualism. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was treated for a time at the Uppsala asylum. Afterwards he lived a secluded life in Stockholm. He went on drawing and painting, but now in an entirely free and visionary style with fairy-tale figures, biblical scenes and faces that seem to float in space. The drawings from the years of his illness were often made in pencil, ink or coloured crayon and show a freedom far ahead of its time.
Josephson died in 1906. His late works, which his contemporaries often dismissed as symptoms of illness, became a model for the modernists. Both De Unga (the Young Ones) in Sweden and the German Expressionists saw him as a forerunner. Today he is seen as one of the great artists of the Nordic 19th century.