The Town

August Strindberg is remembered as one of the great playwrights of his age, and he painted this in 1903, near the end of his life, with no formal art training at all. Painting was something he turned to when the writing wouldn't come, a way through the bad stretches, and he worked fast, spreading the paint on thick with a palette knife rather than a brush. Here a heavy dark sky presses down over a stretch of black water, and across it, small and far off, sits a bright town, its tallest building mirrored in the surface. Between the viewer and that lit town lies the whole expanse of dark sea. Strindberg called himself a symbolist and said his landscapes stood for states of mind, so the distant glow across the water carries more than geography. Long dismissed as a writer's hobby, these canvases are now seen as strikingly ahead of their time, and he's counted a forerunner of Swedish expressionism. The painting is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.