Ernst Josephson (Stockholm 1851–1906) was one of the most innovative Swedish painters of the late nineteenth century and a key precursor of Nordic modernism. Trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, he continued his studies in Paris in the 1870s, absorbing French realism and the work of artists such as Courbet and Bastien-Lepage.

Throughout the 1880s he travelled widely in France, Spain and Norway, producing portraits, landscapes and scenes of everyday life that combine close observation with an increasingly free and expressive handling of paint. Josephson was a leading figure among the so-called Opponenterna, a group of younger artists who challenged academic conservatism in Sweden and paved the way for the formation of the Konstnärsförbundet (Artists’ Association).

From the mid-1880s his art was marked by periods of mental illness, which impelled him to create visionary works such as Strömkarlen and a series of symbolist drawings and paintings. Despite his relatively short life, Josephson’s intensely personal idiom has made him a central figure in the history of Scandinavian art.

The Rapids, Gargilesse belongs to the group of river and waterfall studies executed along the Creuse and is closely related to Josephson’s Norwegian rapids from Eggedal and the celebrated Strömkarlen of 1884. Here the dynamic force of the rushing water is built up with the palette knife in alternating long, sinuously pulled strokes and short, abrupt touches, laid over a ground of deep greens and earth colours. Passages of pure blue, white and red break across the surface, giving the painting an almost abstract chromatic rhythm in which sensation and mood take precedence over description.

Josephson’s personal respons to Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in the works from the summer of 1886 is striking: colour is broken and energised, yet anchored in the darker tones of the forest interior, with Courbet’s influence still present in the underlying realism. In The Rapids, Gargilesse, this fusion of close observation, experimental technique and heightened emotional pitch is pushed to a rare intensity, anticipating later twentieth-century explorations of landscape as a vehicle for self-reflection.