Eugène JANSSON

Winter scenes appear often in the early work of Jansson, who was adept as a pastellist and used the medium to particularly fine effect in such atmospheric scenes as the present sheet. This large pastel landscape is likely to date from the late 1880s or the beginning of the 1890s, during the early part of the artist’s independent career. That Jansson’s early pastel landscapes were admired is seen in the fact that King Oscar II of Sweden purchased one of them in 1891. After around 1894, however, Jansson seems to have worked much less in pastel, perhaps at the suggestion of his friend, the artist Karl Nordström, who seems to have encouraged him to focus on oil paintings instead of pastels.

A closely comparable pastel winter landscape by Jansson, of similar dimensions to the present sheet, appeared at auction in Stockholm in 1999, 2006 and 2009.