Autumn, Varberg

A rain-wet street on the edge of Varberg, the wooden houses and half-bare trees showing through grey weather; in the foreground a fence runs in a diagonal that draws the eye into the picture, and a solitary figure struggles along the red hoarding. Nils Kreuger painted it in 1888, the year after he came home from six years in France and settled at Varberg with his wife Bertha, and it still shows what he had learned there — the sensitive tonal painting of streets and outskirts at dawn and dusk, in mist, rain and snow. Kreuger was born at Kalmar in 1858 and studied at the Stockholm academy from 1874, where he met Richard Bergh and Karl Nordström; in 1881 he went to Paris, worked under Jean-Paul Laurens, made his début at the Paris Salon in 1882 and spent time in the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing. In 1885 he was one of the organisers of the Opponenterna, the revolt of the younger painters against the academy, and he worked for the founding of the Konstnärsförbundet that followed. From 1893 he painted at Varberg alongside Bergh and Nordström — the group later called the Varberg school — turning with them from French plein-air painting to the symbolic national romanticism of the 1890s. This is a small picture, painted on a wooden panel rather than canvas, 32 × 41 cm. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.