Søstre

Painted in 1898 and signed C. Wilhelmson 98, the canvas was acquired by the museum on 10 October 1903. Carl Wilhelmson had grown up in the Bohuslän fishing village of Fiskebäckskil, the son of a naval master who was lost in a shipwreck in 1875; apprenticed in 1881 to a Gothenburg lithography firm, he studied first under Carl Larsson at the Valand Academy and then, from 1890, in Paris, where he took classes from Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis at the Académie Julian and spent the summer of 1893 in Brittany. When he returned to Sweden in 1896, the art patron Pontus Fürstenberg invited him to direct the Valand Academy in Gothenburg, a post he held until 1910; he later ran his own painting school and was made a professor of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1925. The west coast of his childhood and its fishing people became the subject he returned to for the rest of his career, and his canvases are held today by the Nationalmuseum, the Gothenburg Museum of Art and the Statens Museum for Kunst, where this one hangs. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).