Works by August Strindberg

The playwright August Strindberg also painted, but only in periods of personal crisis: stormy seas and shores under heavy skies, built up in thick paint, much of it grey.

He believed chance had a large hand in how a picture turned out, and his paintings stray further from what the eye sees than those of other painters of his day. In a stormy sea with a broom buoy, from 1892, a lone red pole capped with a broom leans out of dark green waves under slanting grey rain. Buoy without Top Mark, from the same year, leaves only a bare pale pole in the swell. In 1892 he had writer's block, his income fell sharply, and depression followed.

Land, sea and sky are the subjects of most of these paintings. He was a friend of Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin and so was familiar with modern painting. Not every picture is a storm: in Wonderland of 1894 a patch of white and pale blue light opens in a dark green thicket, flecked with pink along its lower edge. In The Town, a tall canvas of 1903, grey and black cloud fills most of the height, and a small town with one yellow building sits on the far horizon above a dark sea. Wave VII, from the 1900s, comes down to a dark green sea, a band of pale yellow and a grey sky.

Sources: Wikipedia, Nationalmuseum, Musée d'Orsay.