It is the colourful evening sky at the outlet of Karlbergskanalen into the lake Ulvsundasjön, on an April day in 1906, that Erik Tryggelin has chosen to depict. Tryggelin has stood on the Karlberg side right next to Ekelundsbron. As always, Tryggelin has a special ability to portray environments in his paintings through light and color. Here, one can almost sense how captivated the artist has become by the evening sky's colour explosion and spectacle. Apparently, Tryggelin had a fondness for this particular place. The year before, in 1905, he painted the same view in winter attire but with a grayish sky.
Tryggelin used to pin his canvas during work in the open air. He usually worked in this way and then glued the canvas onto a panel, as he did here.
Erik Tryggelin must be considered one of our foremost Stockholm painters. While the interest in many of his contemporaries has waned in recent years, it has been the opposite for Tryggelin. His Stockholm paintings have gained an increasingly larger audience over the past decade.
Erik Tryggelin belonged to the generation of painters in Sweden who were educated and active during the transitional period when art changed its costume, that is, the period between the Konstnärsförbundet and the breakthrough of modernism with the 1909’s men. After his education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Tryggelin traveled to Paris in 1911 and studied at the Académie Colarossi.
But despite his familiarity with the new trends in Paris, Tryggelin was dismissive of the new painting and continued throughout his life to paint in a more realistic post-impressionistic tradition. He also preferred the small format and can be called an intimist.
Above all, he concentrated his creative work on motifs from Stockholm and Vadstena, places that he portrayed with great love in different seasons.