The Town

The Town is an oil on canvas painting by August Strindberg, dated 1903 and held at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Strindberg, known above all as a writer, had no formal training in art. He painted intermittently, often during periods when writing came with difficulty. His landscapes, especially seascapes, show rough waves, heavy skies and rocks battered by the surf, handled with a spontaneous, personal touch rather than an academic method. His reputation as a painter grew long after his death, and he is now regarded as a forerunner of expressionism in Sweden. The picture shows a town in the distance, its buildings mirrored in the water, beneath a dark sky that fills much of the canvas. The palette is nearly monochrome, dominated by white, black and grey, and the paint is laid on thickly, giving the surface a rough, tense quality. In 2016 the Europeana project named it one of the ten most notable works of art in Sweden.

Painter

August Strindberg

Date

1903

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

94 × 53 cm

Museum

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Depicts

town, storm, ocean

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