SWEDEN (continued 2)

People in Stockholm make pretty hard endeavours to enjoy themselves, and no doubt often succeed. Skansen is perhaps the nicest place of entertainment. It is not so easy to say which is the least nice place, but, if we judge by the amount of alcohol consumed, one or other of the public-houses where ‘Bobban’ and ‘Feta Fille’, and other of Albert Engström’s favourites seek happy oblivion after their own fashion, will serve as a counter-poise. The haunts of pleasure have not often been rendered in art. From Skansen, however, we have Zorn’s amusing picture of the Delsbostintan (peasant-girl from Delsbo) telling a story; but from all our Stockholm theatres there is nothing at all, not even from the new Dramatic theatre, which itself, however, has many good works of art both outside and inside. As for the international life of the circus and music-hall artists, Gösta von Hennings has given us some very valuable pictures, but this has little to do with Sweden seen through artist eyes. Hennings has also painted the ‘punch-drinking’ on the Opera terrace, and it is said to be one of the most Swedish things imaginable to sit on this terrace and look out on a beautiful view, one of the most beautiful in the whole world, Stockholm’s ‘ström’, to the accompaniment of a string-band playing our melancholy folk-songs, all the while drinking punch quietly and steadily, and from time to time breaking the silence with a “Skål i alla fall!” (your health, anyway).

Although there are not a few old, and a great number of modern, beautiful houses in Stockholm, very few of our now-living artists have rendered Riddarhuset (the house of nobles), Börsen (the Exchange) in Stortorget and the old Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) in Järntorget. There is a good deal of ‘stämning’ in Karl Nordström’s drawing “Riddarholmen on a Spring Evening” (page 54). The little holm, which contains so many reminiscences, lies in proud seclusion, with its square silent. Every detail on the old brick walls of the church has a story to tell. Magnus Ladulås once wished to be allowed to sleep the eternal sleep behind the red walls of Riddarholm Church. On the Gustavian mortuary chapel one reads in faded lettering the words dedicated to Gustavus Adolphus: “SVECOS EXALTAVIT. MORIENS TRIVMPHAVIT”, and on the copper roof of the Caroline sepulchral monument the golden crown gleams in the evening sun. Down in the coffin with the lion skin and the club of Hercules lies, with head shot through, king Charles, the young hero, who once with such stubborn resolution set fate and misfortune at defiance.

Many beautiful buildings have been erected in recent times. Among the best are the General Post-office, designed by Ferdinand Boberg, the building of the Trygg Insurance Company, whose massive forms are descried over the tops of the trees in Humlegården Park, designed by Lallerstedt, Nordiska Museet designed by Gustaf Clason, where the style of the Vasa Period is connected in a beautiful and ingenious manner with the style of our old belfries, Läkaresällskapets hus (the premises of the Society of Physicians), designed by Carl Westman, in the old Klara churchyard, where reposes Bellman, the poet who has seen the most beautiful visions of Stockholm, and finally the Östermalm High School by Ragnar Östberg, the most monumental school-building in our country, rich in good art both inside and outside. These buildings still lack, perhaps, the patina of time which painters deem they need before they can depict them; but the most commonplace blocks of modern houses, tenement-buildings, and straight half-finished streets have furnished motives for the art of Karl Nordström, Aron Gerle, and Eugen Jansson. These artists put something passionate into their colouring, they breathe a modern spirit of beautiful defiance into their pictures of these parts of the town which seem hopelessly dreary to the layman, and teach us that they too have their beauty. Many Stockholmers, artists and men of letters perhaps as much as any, live outside the town. They look out over the waters of Stora Värtan from Djursholm (page 53), of Lilla Värtan from Lidingö island, and of the inlet to Stockholm from the park Djurgården. It is in Djurgården that Prince Eugen has his residence, adorned with the best things that modern Swedish art has created. Here the artist-prince paints this natural park, its oaks, meadows, and bays, at all times of the day and the year. Perhaps one might say that he has the very best historical, cultural, and above all artistic, qualifications for seeing Stockholm with artist eyes, when from Valdemarsudde (Valdemar’s point) he gazes at the town raised above the surface of the water.

The Stockholm painter who in his pictures has caught the most subtle essence of the city’s character, an artist who in his glorious symphonic picture-poems has shown himself to be a real innovator in landscape painting, one of the very foremost delineators of nature now living, is Eugen Jansson. He looks mostly out over Stockholm from the heights of Söder (the South), and perhaps he has rendered the city most beautifully and most monumentally in the masterpiece in Carl Robert Lamm’s collection, where the afternoon sun pours its golden rays over Riddarfjärden, Kungsholmen, and the red factories in Söder. In Eugen Jansson’s landscape-art we find many of the most Swedish characteristics, melancholy, yearning, love of gaudy colours, a touch of lyric and musical feeling, something at once soft, defiant, and world-embracing. Just as one of Bellman’s drinking companions in his death-hour sings,

so does one of Eugen Jansson’s pictures arouse in us a feeling of the temporal seen sub specie aeternitatis. He has made many pictures of the view from his windows high up on the hilly ground in the South (page 57). Most of them are in Ernst Thiel’s rich collection. Now he shows us an afternoon in winter, when the boats have opened up a channel in the ice of the bays and the last rays of the sun gleam on the windows of the Palace: now he carries us to steep, lonely, streets with wooden steps, mysteriously lighted by the gas-lamps; now we gaze as in a dream upon the water gleaming in the darkness, lighted up by the gaslight and the electric lamps, which border the quays like so many gleaming bluish-green jewels.

If one goes on a summer night out into the streets, or into one of the small plots of garden which are still to be found on the hilly ground to the South of Stockholm, one has beneath one the arm of Lake Mälaren and almost the whole city dreaming in the light night. The houses and spires of Riddarholmen stand out against the sky, which is ever growing lighter. Stockholm is sleeping, the noises have died down, the workmen have left their clattering steam-winches and iron bars, the sailors are sleeping in their fo’c’sles, the bands in Kungsträdgården and Strömparterren have long since ceased playing. Then is heard from the tower of Riddarholm Church, where Fredman once with trembling hands mended the clock-works, the clock striking the hour with a sound which rings over the water and the town. One thinks of the great who sleep in the church vaults, of those who have fought and suffered, and sometimes given their lives, for Sweden. The sound is carried over the whole sleeping city, which has now for hundreds of years been the centre and greatest treasure of the country. One remembers all those who have thought, written, and worked down there in the town, and one’s thoughts go out over the country to the scented haycocks of Sörmland, to Norrland where the pale light of the midnight sun shines over the ore mountains and the summer huts of the Lapps, to the beech-woods in Skåne, to all our vast country lying there in the summer night, to the people in the red cottages, to those who have toiled in the stony ground. One thinks also with gratitude of those who in song and art have shown us the beauty and the value of what we have owned, still own, and still wish our descendants to preserve, and in our hearts wells up the conviction, at once earnest and joyful: I love Sweden.