Lot 214: Ernst Josephson Swedish 1851-1906 , militär fantasi (military fantasy) oil and ink on panel

signed Ernst Josephson lower right oil and ink on panel

32 by 46cm., 12½ by 18in.

Erik Blomberg, Ernst Josephson. Hans Liv, Stockholm, 1951, p. 553, discussed; p. 555, discussed & illustrated

Carl Larsson, Sundborn
Gösta Stenman, Stockholm
Acquired by the father of the present owner from the above before 1951; thence by descent

PROPERTY OF A SWEDISH PRIVATE COLLECTOR
Painted in 1890, Military Fantasy is the product both of Josephson's strict academic training and his later development of schizophrenia that caused him to be plagued by hallucinations and delusions of divinity.

His fantasy shows two men and two women striking military poses naked on a beach. On the right of the composition a man, possibly a self-portrait, faces the viewer with a flower in his mouth and holds the Swedish flag aloft. To the left a woman in profile beats a drum, to which a man in profile in the centre marches, a musket with bayonet slung over his shoulder. Behind him a second woman lunges forward, brandishing a sword above her head. A beach ball and a small yapping dog appear in the lower right. Beyond lies an azure sea. The Swedish flag is set against a cloudy sky; to the left the sky is both clear blue and stormy; sunny and overcast.

The nationalistic theme of Josephson's fantasy reflects his interest in Swedish legends and Symbolism. During the 1880s one of the principle subjects of his work was a mythical Swedish water sprite condemned to play its fiddle eternally and that enticed listeners to death by drowning. He also shared an interest in occult phenomena common in the 1880s and 1890s. It was following a spiritualist séance living on the Ile de Bréhat off the coast of Brittany in 1887 that his mental health started to deteriorate.

Although he continued to work prolifically through his illness, he was often in a trance like state. Describing his condition Erik Blomberg wrote that Josephson described his illness as a '... sort of "boyishness" - it among other things brought a return to the imaginary world of his childhood and adolescence, when he still lived in a historical and romantic period... It is most definitely for this reason that the military, the armed forces and the monarchy gained its power over his imagination. In a letter... he speaks of himself as a "carrier of the banner' (Erik Blomberg, Ernst Josephson. Hans Liv, Stockholm, 1951, p. 553, translated from the Swedish).

Josephson had first trained at the Art Academy in Stockholm before travelling across Europe and studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme in the mid-1870s. As a student he was attracted to the work of the Old Masters. He copied Velázquez, Raphael, Titian and Rembrandt, and he painted historical and Biblical subjects in the spirit of the Renaissance. In the present work the displacement of the nude figures across the composition show a clear debt to this classical training, in particular the politically charged work of the neo-classical painter Jaques Louis-David whose Intervention of the Sabine Women shares striking similarities with Josephson's conception of the the present painting (fig. 1). In Paris from 1879 until 1886 Josephson developed an acute interest in contemporary French painters, notably the work of Edouard Manet. The bold unadorned forms of the figures in Military Fantasy placed in the foreground of the composition are shocking in their bald Realism, and recall such works as Manet's controversial The Execution of Maximilien.

Like his fellow Swedes and exact contemporaries August Strindberg and Carl Frederick Hill, Josephson was a controversial figure during his life. After his death, however, his work was appreciated in Germany in particular, and the frenetic energy, emotional naivety and vivid palette that are such a feature of his later works was recognised as of seminal importance in the development of Expressionism.

FIG. 1: Jacques-Louis David, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, The Louvre Museum, Paris
digi ref. 379D08181