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Jansson, Eugène (Fredrik)
(b Stockholm, 18 March 1862; d Stockholm, 15 June 1915). Swedish painter. His childhood was overshadowed by poverty and ill-health (including deafness), and he remained somewhat on the margins of society throughout his life. He studied (1881–2) at the Painting School run by Edvard Perséus (1841–90) and briefly at the Akademi för de Fria Konsterna in Stockholm; but he was largely self-taught. With the exception of two journeys abroad, which had very little influence on his art, he lived all his life in Stockholm, and it was the city that provided most of his subject-matter. In the mid-1880s Jansson was greatly stimulated by contact with Swedish artists returning from Paris, in particular Karl Nordström. Jansson’s painting Roslagsgatan (1889; Stockholm, Thielska Gal.) clearly reveals Nordström’s influence. Jansson was one of the first Swedish artists to concentrate on twilight scenes. He produced his first painting of this kind in 1883, but the ‘blue period’, for which he became well known, started in earnest in 1890 and lasted until 1905. In 1891 he moved to Södermalm, the workers’ quarter of Stockholm, and took as the principal subject of his paintings views of the city at dawn and dusk as seen from his studio. The perspective of these views is topographically correct but undergoes greater decorative stylization than found in the work of any other Swedish painter of the time. In such paintings as Riddarfjärden in Stockholm (1898; Stockholm, Nmus.; see fig.) or Nocturne (1901; Stockholm, Thielska Gal.) Jansson transformed his motif of lights reflected in water into the billowing ornament typical of Art Nouveau. The character of these magnificent night views is visionary and dream-like, partly explained by the fact that they were deliberately painted from memory, without any attempt at preliminary on-the-spot study. The synthesizing and symbolic character of Jansson’s paintings during his ‘blue period’ was also a result of the influence of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, whose works were shown at an exhibition that arrived in Stockholm from Berlin in 1894. The banker Ernest Thiel, a good friend and patron of Jansson, also admired and collected works by Munch. Jansson’s Rosenlundsgatan (1895; Stockholm, Thielska Gal.), where the rhythmical stylization is especially strong, shows Munch’s influence very clearly. Such works, showing nocturnal views of desolate streets, constituted another category in Jansson’s output. In paintings such as Hornsgatan at Night (1902; Stockholm, Nmus.), a real location in all its banal detail is transformed into a landscape of the soul. Jansson established a melancholy, poetic mood similar to that evoked in contemporary Swedish poetry.
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