Julia Beck

In the spring of 1882, the Scandinavian artist colony in the small village of Gréz-sur-Loing, a few kilometres from Fontainebleau outside Paris, was established. In this ‘artistic powerhouse’, Julia Beck executed a number of motifs that today are largely seen as a link between French and Scandinavian painting at the end of the 19th century. In connection with the exhibition ‘De drogo till Paris -Nordiska konstnärinnor på 1880-talet’ at Liljevalchs konsthall in Stockholm in autumn 1988, Inga Zachau wrote the following about Beck: ‘She had lived so long in France that her art was French in every detail. The French mist rests over them, making the colours pleasantly mild. Julia Beck liked to paint river landscapes embedded in mist, which gives her paintings a melancholy atmosphere. A Nordic trait can possibly be traced here, namely the attraction to melancholy. Julia Beck's paintings are not, however, as melancholy as the Nordic ones, but rather contain a gentle, serious mood of reflection. [...] Japonism was all the rage at the turn of the century and many artists have been influenced by the Japanese way of seeing nature. This is also true of Julia Beck, who liked to set the horizon line high and let various reeds shade the foreground of her river landscapes.’

When a cholera epidemic broke out in Paris in the summer of 1884, most artists fled the city. Some of the Scandinavians were forced to return to Sweden, but Julia Beck had other plans. On July 9 she said goodbye to her friends Per Hasselberg and Eva Bonnier at Gare Montparnasse and travelled by train to the small coastal village of Carolles in Normandy, where the artist Per Ekström lived. Beck's arrival coincided with the stays of fellow artists Georg Arsenius and Johan Tirén, forming a small Swedish artist colony. Beck remained in Carolles until mid-August, when she returned to Paris.

In the present painting, Beck has depicted the south-west corner of the Église Saint-Vigor de Carolles, located in the centre of the village. A gentle haze envelopes the quiet space and the melancholy atmosphere is enhanced by a lonely cross that seems to lean abandoned. Between the graves, however, greenery sprouts. Delicate flowers of cow parsley sway against the stone wall of the church, and blue forget-me-nots push their way up between the tufts of grass. The elegantly composed flower stems and reeds of grass in the foreground are reminiscent of Japonism and Julia Beck's river landscapes from Gréz-sur-Loing.