Anna Boberg - Boats under the Snow, Lofoten

Anna Boberg (Stockholm 1864–1935 Stockholm)

"Boats under the Snow" - Fishing boats at anchor in Lofoten 

Fishing boats at anchor in Lofoten
Signed “A. Boberg”
oil on canvas
unframed 40 x 60 cm (15.7 x 23.6 in)
framed 49 x 68 cm (19.3 x 26.8 in) 
the original frame is included.

Provenance: 
A Swedish private collection, we sell it in kommission for a client. 

Exhibited
La Decima Esposizione a Venezia, 1912 (10th International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice). Catalogue by Ugo Ojetti, 1912, no. 312, Barche sotto la Neve (Boats under the Snow).
(Possibly) included in the travelling exhibition Contemporary Scandinavian Art, shown in New York, Buffalo, Toledo, Chicago and Boston, 1912–1913. Listed as no. 4, After the Day’s Work, on p. 55. The exhibition featured seven works by Anna Boberg.

Essay:
The Venice exhibition of 1912, today known as the Biennale, included six works by Boberg, nos. 311–316. Four of these were illustrated in the catalogue (311, 313, 314 and 316).

Between late 1912 and 1913, the American-Scandinavian Society organised a major travelling exhibition that was shown in several American museums. Among the 176 works presented, Boberg was the only woman artist. Her Swedish colleagues included Gustaf Fjaestad, Otto Hesselbom, Gunnar Hallström, Bruno Liljefors, Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn and Carl Milles. It is quite possible that the present painting was part of her contribution.

Boberg had already achieved an international reputation by this time. Her Arctic paintings had been praised in Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, Venice and Chicago. In 1906, the Boston Daily Globe famously referred to her as “Sweden’s greatest artist” in an article titled Barefoot in Polar Snow: Swedish Woman Artist Braves Cold for Arctic Effects.

She was born in Stockholm in 1864 into a creative and well-connected family. Her father, Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander, was one of Sweden’s most prominent architects. Boberg studied briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris, where she met the architect Ferdinand Boberg, whom she later married. Her artistic identity became closely tied to the dramatic Arctic landscapes of the Lofoten Islands, an archipelago off the northern coast of Norway, 150 kilometres above the Arctic Circle. Her first visit took place in 1901. Captivated by the scenery, she stayed to paint even after her husband returned home, and over the next three decades she returned many times, in all seasons, to capture the region’s shifting light. Translating the rich sensorial experience of the Arctic sea became, as she put it, her lifelong passion.

Boberg worked in many media. She designed textiles, ceramics and glass, wrote an opera libretto, published travelogues and later produced an autobiography (1934). Most of her known works are now housed in Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, donated in 1940 by Ferdinand Boberg.

Recent scholarship by Dr Isabelle Gapp (A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890–1930, 2024) and Eva Charlotta Mebius (Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum, vol. 27:1, 2020) has helped to restore Boberg’s place within a male-dominated history of landscape painting. Growing international interest has led to several acquisitions of her works by American museums.

In her autobiography, Boberg described her Arctic journeys in vivid detail. She wrote of fog, evaporation glistening like ice, and the red disc of the sun glowing faintly through the mist. She told of witnessing what she called the “Flying Dutchman of the Polar Seas”, a ghostly and enormous ship shape that drifted silently through the fog before disappearing again. These reflections reveal her unusual combination of atmospheric precision and poetic imagination. Many of her paintings balance these qualities and occupy a space between Impressionism and Symbolism, two major artistic currents of the period.

Dr Gapp argues that Boberg’s work challenges prevailing national narratives in Scandinavian art history. Her depictions of glaciers and the fishing communities of Lofoten create a dialogue between art, environmental history and contemporary climate concerns. Gapp notes that Boberg also offered an alternative to the conventional idea of the Arctic as an exclusively masculine sphere. Boberg even described herself as a “polar researcher” during an era when polar exploration, art and science were dominated by men.