The Water Sprite
The water sprite plays the violin, naked in the rapids. The Nationalmuseum refused to buy the painting, which was considered indecent. Today it is regarded as one of the great works of Swedish art.
The foaming water and the white flowers surround the glowing body – the folk tale as sensual experience.
Ernst Josephson was born in 1851 into a well-known Jewish family in Stockholm. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and then abroad, in Paris among other places. He was one of the leading figures among the young artists who in the 1880s protested against the Academy’s conservative teaching, the so-called Opponents. He was influenced by Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Titian, but at the same time sought a modern path of his own.
The Strömkarl, or Näck, is a figure from Nordic folklore. He was said to sit in rapids and waterfalls playing the violin. Anyone who made an offering to him could learn to play so well that even trees and stones began to dance. But the water sprite could also be dangerous and lure people into the water.
Josephson painted the subject in several versions. He visited Norway in the summers of 1882 and 1883 to study rapids and waterfalls. The best-known version dates from 1884. It shows a naked young man sitting in the rapids playing the violin. The water foams around him, and white flowers grow on the bank. His body glows warm and sensual against the cold water. His face is turned upwards and his expression rapt, as if the music were carrying him away.
The colours are intense and the brushwork vigorous and free. Josephson painted the water with quick, mobile strokes. He wanted not merely to show a figure from a fairy tale but to express the music, the force of nature and a powerful emotion. The picture has therefore been called an early example of Expressionism in the Nordic countries. The foaming water is painted in white and green, with splashes and eddies that make the image almost abstract.
His contemporaries found the subject and the naked male body indecent. The Nationalmuseum declined to buy the painting. Josephson felt this as a great failure. For him The Water Sprite was a major work, and he returned to the subject throughout his life. He believed that the art institutions did not understand what he was trying to achieve.
In 1888 Josephson was struck by a severe mental illness during a stay in Brittany. He remained ill for the rest of his life. During the years of illness he made drawings and paintings in an entirely new, free style. These works aroused great admiration among the young modernist generation, including German and Swedish Expressionists.
Josephson died in 1906. Today The Water Sprite is regarded as one of the most important works in Swedish art history. It shows how folk poetry could be renewed and become an image of the artist’s own inner life. It is one of the pictures most often singled out when explaining Swedish art’s path towards modernism.