Kirkegårdsmotiv

The signature on the canvas reads G. Kallstenius Vestervik 1890, naming both the year and the small town on the Swedish east coast where the painter was born in 1861. Gottfrid Kallstenius studied under Edvard Perséus before entering the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1884, and he graduated from it in 1888 with two medals; some years later a travel scholarship took him and his wife, the painter Gerda Roosval, whom he married in 1891, to Paris and then to Le Pouldu in Brittany — the village where Paul Gauguin had spent the previous summer — before further study with Raphaël Collin and a stay in the Swedish artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing. A visit to Italy in 1893 and 1894 turned him increasingly towards decoration and ornament, the field in which he later taught and in which he produced an altarpiece, murals and mosaics, and he also wrote books on oil painting and its materials. The museum acquired this picture in 1894, four years after it was painted. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).