An Arctic Impressionism? Anna Boberg and the Lofoten Islands

The dusty pinks and yellows of twilight descend below the mountains in Swedish painter Anna Boberg’s early twentieth-century painting Boat with Net, Study from Lofoten. Boberg’s play with light submerging the fjordal Arctic landscape of the Lofoten Islands in shades of blue, gray, pink, and yellow emphasizes the stillness of the fishing vessels in the foreground. Bearing in mind the coastal significance of the islands, Boberg’s plein-air paintings offer a far-northern extension of an ecological impressionism, factoring in both environmental and cultural concerns, alongside artistic practice. Boberg first visited the Lofoten Islands in the summer of 1901. Greg M. Thomas’s groundbreaking eco-critical model for art history in Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Theodore Rousseau introduced an “earth narrative” in opposition to the social narrative prevalent in realist and naturalist landscape paintings, but paid little attention to the pivotal role a plein-air practice played in the development of both styles.