Roslagsgatan, Stockholm

The title names a street in the northern part of Stockholm — the city where Karl Nordström settled in 1888 and where, in the 1890s, he made a group of townscapes that stand somewhat apart from the landscapes of the Bohuslän coast for which he is best known. Born on the island of Tjörn in 1855, he had studied at the Stockholm academy and then worked on his own in France from 1880 to 1882, looking closely at the Impressionists, before joining the young painters who broke with the academy in the 1880s; from 1896 to 1920 he chaired the Artists’ Association (Konstnärsförbundet) that grew out of that opposition, and in the 1890s he belonged to the group later called the Varberg school. The museum dates the canvas to about 1895 and showed it in the exhibition Nordic Highlights in 2017, the year it entered the collection. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).