Evening Mood-Lidingö (1900): Art, History and Details

Evening Mood-Lidingö (1900) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eugène Jansson (Swedish, 1862–1915).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The swirling brushstrokes and telescopic perspective in this view of a field near Stockholm, Sweden, converge on the dark mass of trees and dying sunset in the center. Feelings of melancholy and loneliness are relieved only by the appearance of the first evening star. Although little known in the United States, Eugène Janssen was one of the most important artists of Scandinavian modernism. He became aware of the works of the Norwegian Symbolist Edvard Munch as early as 1884 and shared Munch’s ambition of exploring psychological states of mind rather than adhering to external appearances.

Object facts

• Title: Evening Mood-Lidingö
• Date: 1900
• Creator attribution: Eugène Jansson (Swedish, 1862–1915)
• Culture: Sweden, 20th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 94 x 172.4 x 5.1 cm (37 x 67 7/8 x 2 in.); Unframed: 90.1 x 168.6 cm (35 1/2 x 66 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2005.4

A detail from the museum

Jansson, known as the "Blue Painter," was called "Paraffin Jansson" by other artists because the light in his paintings reminded them of the light from the paraffin (kerosene) lamps widely used in houses at the time.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shepherd Gallery. The Swedish Vision: Landscape and Figurative Painting 1885-1920 : Shepherd Gallery, New York, October 16th to December 7th, 1985, an Exhibition. Stockholm: Moser & Klang, 1985.
• Lochnan, Katharine Jordan, ed. Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent Van Gogh to Emily Carr. Munich: DelMonico Books Prestel, 2016.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.