August Strindberg

August Strindberg is best known as a writer, the Swede who wrote Miss Julie and The Father, plays that dragged European theatre into raw psychological warfare between husbands and wives. But he was also a painter, and it is his paintings that hang here. He never trained, never took a commission, and painted almost nothing except the sea and the sky over it.

He painted in bursts, and always in trouble. When a marriage collapsed, or his writing dried up, or his mind gave way in Paris in the 1890s during the breakdown he later wrote up as his "Inferno" years, he would put down the pen and pick up a palette knife. He worked fast, scraping thick slabs of paint straight onto the board and letting accident do half the composing. In an 1894 essay he made it a method: begin more or less at random, then let nature's own pull toward form finish the picture.

What came out were small, violent seascapes, usually a single wave or a lone rock under a wall of storm cloud, with no boats and no people in them. His contemporaries treated them as the odd sideline of a famous author and mostly ignored them. Painters looking back from the next century saw a man laying on paint with a knife and trusting chance decades before abstract art made a movement of it. His stormy little panels, once almost unsellable, now sell for millions and hang in museums like the Tate in London and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.