Livsglæden

The title the painter gave it is French — La joie de vivre — and beneath it he wrote, in pen and ink, Études des Modes de Paris, studies in the fashions of Paris. He signed the canvas Brehat 1887, for the summer spent on the Île-de-Bréhat in Brittany with the painter and engraver Allan Österlind and his family, three years after the Nationalmuseum refused Strömkarlen and Prince Eugen bought it instead. Ernst Josephson had joined the Opponents of 1885, the painters who broke with the Academy over its exhibition policy, and a pasted label from their exhibition survives on the back of this canvas. The summer after it was painted the delusions that had begun to trouble him on the same island overtook him; he was taken home and admitted to Ulleråker hospital in Uppsala, and though he lived until 1906, painting gave way to drawing. Edvard H. Casparsson bought this canvas on 1 April 1897 and recorded the purchase on it; it came to the museum in 1960 as a gift of the Carlsberg Foundation, and hung in SMK’s own 100 Masterpieces in 1996. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).