Julia Beck

Julia Beck's remarkable artistic career has increasingly gained attention in recent years within literary and museum contexts, including exhibitions such as "Ljusets magi. Friluftsmåleri från sent 1800-tal" (2016) and "Grez-sur-Loing. Konst och relationer" (2019) at Prince Eugen's Waldemarsudde in Stockholm.

One aspect often highlighted is how internationally oriented Beck's art was compared to many of her contemporaries. Alexandra Herlitz, for example, writes in "Grez-sur-Loing revisited. The international artist’s colony in a different light" (Academic dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art and Visual Science at the University of Gothenburg, 2013):

"As she was one of the Swedish artists to live in Grez most, even when there were not many Swedes there, she was certainly one of the Swedish artists who have drawn greatest inspiration from the artistic context of the international colony. […] She was a landscapist, and produced paintings that did not employ any, or only very small, staffage. […] Nevertheless her paintings show a dedicated affiliation with the international colony that was her base. Hers are sentimental landscapes in which the melancholic mood is the most striking element. With her tonal approach and mild greyish palette she is aligned with the colony’s prevailing expression in the early 1880s, even without the employment of figures."

Beck's painting balanced between Swedish characteristics and international currents, particularly evident in her works from Grez during the 1880s which show the influence of Japanese art. During the exhibition "They Went to Paris – Nordic Female Artists in the 1880s" at Liljevalchs Art Gallery in Stockholm in autumn 1988, Inga Zachau wrote the following in the exhibition catalogue:

"She had lived so long in France that her art was French down to the smallest detail. Over them rests the French haze that makes the colours pleasantly mild. Julia Beck often painted river landscapes enveloped in mist, which gives the paintings a melancholic mood. Here, a Nordic trait can possibly be traced, namely the attraction to the melancholic. However, Julia Beck's paintings are not sorrowfully melancholic like the Nordic ones but contain more a mild, serious mood of reflection. […] She also often gave her paintings a long, narrow form which gives clear associations to Japanese art. Japonism was all the rage at the turn of the century and many artists were influenced by the Japanese way of seeing nature. This also applies to Julia Beck who liked to place the horizon line high and let various reeds shade the foreground in her river landscapes."

Beck's preference for "melancholic river landscapes enveloped in mist" is clarified by an eyewitness account by none other than August Strindberg, who writes in "Bland franska bönder", 1886: "Julia Beck sat for several weeks in rain and fog and even ventured out into the marsh with horse and cart or walked around in large clogs to get her grey weather mood just right."

In September 1888, Beck permanently moved to France and settled in Vaucresson. Kåa Wennberg mentions this in "Julia Beck", 2012:

"In the small town of Vaucresson, two miles west of Paris, she found the perfect place to paint and here she decided to settle down – she remained here for the rest of her life. […] Beautifully located in a valley and surrounded by verdant hills, Vaucresson was a grateful place if one, like Julia Beck, sought scenic motifs."

It is this inspiration that underlies the magnificent landscapes Beck executed in the following years. Often she adhered to the Japonisme perspective, but the radical painting technique anticipates, in its refined boldness and simplification, much of the 20th century's painting in these canvases where a distinctive mist hovers over the pond's water surface and surrounding vegetation.

Gunvor Persson also wrote in her biography of Julia Beck in one of Stockholm's newspapers shortly after Julia Beck's death in 1935:

"In Vaucresson, Julia Beck found the motifs she most loved to paint: a small tarn where trees reflect in the water, an autumn morning with yellowing leaves and mist in the air."