The Artist, Julia Beck

The landscape painter Julia Beck, painted by her friend and colleague Richard Bergh as an elegant Parisian and an intellectual woman, among the small things he believed made her herself — flowers, a Chinese fan, books, a mirror. Bergh called it an environment portrait, and explained it in his own words: “She loves flowers, Chinese fans, books, mirrors, all sorts of small items”, he wrote, “and without these I do not believe one can obtain the ‘Julia Beck’ who I have come to know and want to depict.” Beck had studied at the Stockholm academy from 1872 to 1878, one of the women students there and noted for her calligraphy, and in the early 1880s she was in Paris and at the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, painting the portraits and the spare, atmospheric landscapes for which she is remembered; she settled in France and was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1934, a year before her death at Vaucresson. Bergh, born in Stockholm in 1858, was the son of the landscape painter Edvard Bergh; he studied in Paris from 1881, made his Salon début in 1883 with a portrait of Nils Kreuger, and became one of the leaders of the Opponenterna and secretary of the Konstnärsförbundet, ending his career as director-general of the Nationalmuseum from 1915 until his death in 1919. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.