Ernst Josephson
Ernst Josephson · Arts & Literature
Swedish painter of The Water Sprite and leader of the artists' revolt of 1885, whose drawings from his years of illness anticipated Expressionism
16 avril 1851, Stockholm, Suède — 22 novembre 1906, Stockholm, Suède
Stockholm, Paris, Bréhat
Ernst Josephson is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Swedish painter of The Water Sprite and leader of the artists' revolt of 1885, whose drawings from his years of illness anticipated Expressionism
Origins and early life
Ernst Josephson was born in Stockholm on 16 April 1851 into one of the prominent Jewish families of Sweden, of German origin, which gave the country the composer Jacob Axel Josephson and the theatre director Ludvig Josephson, his uncles, and in a later generation the actor Erland Josephson; he was Jewish by birth and family, and this fiche rests on nothing else. He entered the Royal Academy of Arts at sixteen, declaring that he would be 'Sweden's Rembrandt or die', studied in Paris and travelled to Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, and painted portraits of a psychological intensity new in Swedish art, among them the Spanish Blacksmiths and the portrait of his friend the painter Carl Skånberg.
Work and career
In 1885 he led the Opponents, the revolt of eighty-four young artists against the Academy that founded the modern art of Sweden, and in the same years he painted his masterpiece, Strömkarlen, The Water Sprite, the naked river spirit of Nordic legend playing his fiddle in the torrent, which the National Museum refused in 1884 and Prince Eugen bought for his own walls. In 1888, on the island of Bréhat in Brittany, he fell into the mental illness — schizophrenia, in modern terms — from which he never recovered; he believed himself possessed by the spirits of dead masters and, in eighteen years of seclusion in Stockholm, made thousands of drawings and paintings of a raw, visionary freedom that Picasso, Matisse, Nolde and Kokoschka saw and admired, and that the twentieth century recognized as its own before its time. He also wrote poetry, the collections Black Roses and Yellow Roses, and died in Stockholm on 22 November 1906.
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Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/josephson-ernst
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Swedish painter of The Water Sprite and leader of the artists' revolt of 1885, whose drawings from his years of illness anticipated Expressionism
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/josephson-ernst
