The Artist’s Wife

The sitter is the painter’s wife, the artist Tekla Lindeström, whom he married in 1886: the two had worked alongside Carl Larsson in the Swedish artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing, spent their first years together on the west coast and moved to Stockholm in 1888, and she belonged to the circle of painters that shaped his own art. Karl Nordström — born on the island of Tjörn in 1855, the son of a district constable — is known above all for his landscapes and for his depictions of fishing families in Bohuslän, and in the 1890s he belonged to the group of painters later called the Varberg school. He had studied at the Stockholm academy, then worked on his own in France from 1880 to 1882, where he looked closely at the Impressionists; from 1896 to 1920 he was chairman of the Artists’ Association, the body that grew out of the 1880s opposition to the academy, and so presided over Swedish art through the years in which this portrait of his wife was painted. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.