Nordischer Sommerabend

By the 1890s a group of Swedish painters who had learned open-air light in Paris, calling themselves the Opponents, were coming home to paint their own country and its long pale summer dusk that never quite goes dark. Bergh places two real people on a veranda on the island of Lidingo, near Stockholm: Prince Eugen, himself a landscape painter, and the singer Karin Pyk. They stand a little apart, turned away from us toward water so still it mirrors the orange sky, and whatever passes between them the painting leaves unsettled. Bergh worked the canvas over two summers, from 1899 into 1900, to hold that single hour of light.