“Evening” is a colourist masterpiece by “the blue painter” Eugène Jansson, still seen as a peculiarly unique figure in international art history. The artist’s portrayals of a Stockholm on the verge of increasing modernity in shimmering blue dawns and dusks have attracted huge attention worldwide.
“Evening”, painted in 1894, has been identified by Nils G. Wollin as a view of Årstaviken from Södermalm. Despite the influx of modernity, at that time Stockholm still comprised large areas of green space, almost countryside. At this period Tantolunden was virtually a wilderness on the doorstep of the artist’s home at Bastugatan 40 and it is precisely this that has clearly attracted the artist in the painting’s romantic landscape depiction in which lyricism and longing wander through the still Stockholm night hand in hand with weakness and melancholy.