A very short excerpt from my chapter in Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (eds. Emily C. Burns and Alice M. Rudy Price, Routledge 2021), 90.
“The dusty pinks and yellows of twilight descend below the mountains in Swedish painter Anna Boberg’s early twentieth-century painting Boat with Net, Study from Lofoten (Figure 7.1). As one of the northernmost populated regions in the world, the landscape of the Lofoten archipelago at 68°20’N, only 2,420 km south of the North Pole, has shaped artistic responses to the imaginary of a Nordic landscape. Of her Lofoten sketches following the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915, the U.S. art critic Christian Brinton claimed that “you will . . . not fail to note the vigorous Lofoten Island color-sketches of Anna Boberg.” In Boat with Net, the shadows of the boats in the fjord sit upon the fading yellow surface of the water and are roughly delineated by rushed graphite lines that embellish the canvas. These themselves are mirrored in the hurried markings scribbled across the rock-face of the unlimitable stretch of mountain. These marks have been applied to the painted surface of pale grays and blues as if shadowing where one mountain begins and the other ends…”
Full chapter available here or just drop me an email if you don’t have access.
Isabelle Gapp 