Gustaf Wilhelm Palm

The auction's impressionistically influenced street scene, featuring a young lady with a parasol lifting her skirt as she crosses a puddle on the pavement, undoubtedly deviates from what is primarily associated with Gustaf Wilhelm Palm. The artist became famous for his numerous landscape paintings from Italy, executed in a style marked by the classicising German-Roman landscape art that he learned during his ten years in Rome in the 1840s. These studio-emphasised paintings became very popular, and when Palm returned to Sweden in the early 1850s, commissions poured in.

Back in Sweden, Gustaf Wilhelm Palm continued to paint in the same style for the rest of his career, but in the 1880s, the ageing artist entered an unusually creative flow. In her presentation of the artist, Brita Linde highlights how Palm then produced "a series of exquisite watercolours from Gotland, often painted wet-on-wet in an impressionistic manner that was fully in tune with the contemporary plein air painting." It is in this light that we should view the auction's painting from 1885. Here, Palm is unmistakably in tune with the times, capturing a fleeting moment, in the form of the young lady's slightly lifted skirt, much like one of the contemporary French impressionists. The motif gives the impression of being experienced firsthand during one of the artist's city walks. Gustaf Wilhelm Palm succeeds in conveying this feeling so that we as viewers also feel transported in time and space to the street life of 1880s Stockholm.

The painting also demonstrates Palm's fine colouristic ability, which had been noted already during his study years. In an effective manner, the fundamentally subdued colour palette is highlighted by a few elements in the form of the white in the woman's extended leg, the red parasol, and the blue object in the shop window - three elements in the colours of the tricolour, which serve as a discreet nod to the French models. Gustaf Wilhelm Palm appears to have created the auction's painting solely for his own great pleasure, without any thought of conforming to the conservative Swedish clientele. Thus, he has achieved an unusual freshness in his depiction of a moment that delights the observant, but passes unnoticed by the masses. A fragmentary label on the back of the painting also indicates that Gustaf Wilhelm Palm has donated the auction's painting to a "Miss August".