I end this week with two short articles in complete contrast to its start. They commemorate the death a century ago of one of the fathers of Modernism, Karl Oscar Isakson (1878–1922), who was born in Sweden but painted for much of his brief career in Denmark.

Like Carl Larsson, Isakson was born in abject poverty in Stockholm, in January 1878. His father was a blacksmith, but died when Isakson was still an infant, leaving his mother to run a laundry to feed her family. He left school when he was only 13, and became assistant to a painter, which led him on to evening school classes in drawing. He became Larsson’s assistant, when the great Swedish master was working on his frescoes in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm, and that led to Isakson studying at the Swedish Academy.

In 1902, he was awarded a bursary to travel to Italy, where he met the colony of Danish artists and found strong encouragement in his career. After being introduced to Post-Impressionism and the paintings of Paul Cézanne, he returned to Copenhagen, Denmark, with Kristian Zahrtmann, where he continued to train. Between 1905-07 he trained in Paris at the Académie Colarossi, under the Norwegian master Christian Krohg.

Initially, Isakson painted portraits of friends, including this Portrait of Mrs. Bertha Brandstrup in 1909. She was the wife of the Danish sculptor Ludvig Brandstrup (1861-1935), whose house Isakson frequented at that time. Bertha Nancy Hirschsprung had married Brandstrup in 1894, but sadly died in 1918, I think a victim of the influenza pandemic.

Just a year or two later, Isakson’s style had become much more sketchy and his colour more intense in chroma. In 1910-11 he painted his Lady with Hand Mirror.

Throughout his short career, Isakson painted still lifes, apparently influenced by those of Cézanne. Still Life with Blue Bowl and Fruits dates from 1910-11.

In 1911, he first visited the small Baltic island of Christiansø, near the larger and more populous Bornholm, the easternmost parts of Denmark.

Around that time, he painted this Portrait of the Painter Karl Schou (c 1911). Schou was a Danish painter eight years older than Isakson.

Composition with Hyacinth, Fruits and Blue Bowl from 1911 is a more elaborate still life.

Isakson’s landscapes seem to have been painted in front of the motif, and simplify while remaining realist. Graveyard, Christiansø from 1911-13 shows the small cemetery on that island.

Isakson returned to Paris briefly in 1914, where he studied again at its academies. With the outbreak of war, Christiansø became a military base and out of bounds to foreigners like Isakson, so he spent time on nearby Bornholm.

He painted Reclining Model in 1914-15, during the early part of the war.

This Still Life dates from 1916.

During the Great War, Isakson suffered from acute mental illness from which he never fully recovered.

Reference

Wikipedia.