Wave VII

Strindberg painted in three separate bursts across his life, and this canvas comes from the last of them, around 1900 or 1901, when he took up the brush again in Stockholm after six years away from it. He had begun painting waves in 1892 and returned to them in several versions. The canvas is small, upright and almost bare. A grey sky of heavy, dragged strokes, a dark green sea, and between them a thin strip of yellow light with a white line of foam along its lower edge. The Musée d'Orsay describes the sea and the clouds as nearly merging, pressing in on that band of light. It was shown at Gummeson's gallery in Stockholm in 1924, and the French state bought it at the Bukowskis auction house there in April 1981.