Johan Krouthén

When he was 14, Krouthén left school and started an apprenticeship with Svante Leonard Rydholm, a photographer and artist, where he learnt the basic skills of both painting and photography.

In 1875, at the age 16, he joined the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm where he studied drawing, portrait painting and landscaping.

In addition to his education at the Academy, he was also taught by Swedish artist Edvard Perséus, who was skeptical of formal instruction and encouraged his students to paint naturally.

In 1881, Krouthén spent a short period in Paris, a popular destination for Swedish artists in the 1880s, but he soon returned to Sweden where he painted in Scania and in Bohuslän with its rocky landscapes.

His painting of a desolate landscape with a barefoot boy on a dirt track was exhibited in Stockholm in 1883, arousing considerable attention as a result of its realistic, unembellished look.

In the summer of 1883, he joined Oscar Björck at Skagen in the north of Jutland, where there was a small colony of artists from Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Instead of groups of weathered fishermen, Krouthén painted landscapes of the flat desolate Grenen beaches.

A comparison between the photograph and the finished painting shows that Krouthén abandoned Realism in favour of Idealism.

Following the death in childbirth of his wife Hulda in 1891, Krouthén and his children moved to the Gottfridsberg district of Linköping.

Krouthén's later career, with paintings of red wooden cottages and flowering trees, was rather uninteresting from an artistic point of view.

All the isms people talk about are pretty pointless if they are no more than an imitation of traditional art with a lower level of culture."