Stormy Sea

Marcus Larson was the painter of bad weather. Born at Åtvidaberg in Östergötland in 1825, he trained in Stockholm and then in Düsseldorf, and he built his short career on the sea at its most violent — wrecks, burning steamers, and the long swell that comes before a storm. He is counted among the foremost Swedish landscape painters of the nineteenth century, and the Nationalmuseum, which owns several of his canvases, has called him the extreme-weather painter. In this one the light does the work: a storm sky of black and sulphur above a sea breaking into bright surf, with a boat the eye finds only after the weather. Larson died in London in January 1864, at thirty-nine, at the height of his powers. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.