Fishermen’s Wives Returning from Church

Wilhelmson came to know Gauguin’s painting on his travels in France, and when he afterwards painted the coast of Bohuslän — the bare granite shore north of Gothenburg, where he was born in 1866 — he carried the lesson home with him: flat, bright colour laid on in broad areas, sea and rock simplified into shapes, and the people of the villages set into the landscape as though they belonged to it. Here a congregation is walking back from church along the road, the women in dark Sunday dress moving against the pale rock and water. The museum notes that his surfaces are matte and dry, as if the paintings had themselves been exposed to the sunlight and the salt wind. Wilhelmson ran a painting school in Stockholm that taught a generation of Swedish artists, and he died in 1928. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.