Eugène Jansson

Who was Eugène Jansson?

Eugène Fredrik Jansson was a Swedish painter known for his night-time land- and cityscapes dominated by shades of blue. Towards the end of his life, from about 1904, he mainly painted male nudes. The earlier of these phases has caused him to sometimes be referred to as blåmålaren, "the blue-painter".

Jansson's parents belonged to a social stratum straddling the working and the lower middle class but were interested in art and music and ambitious for their two sons, Eugène and his younger brother Adrian. Eugène went to the German School in Stockholm and took piano lessons. An attack of scarlet fever at the age of fourteen caused him health issues which he suffered from for the rest of his life, including bad eyesight and hearing and chronic kidney problems.

Jansson enrolled in the Tekniska skolan and studied for Edvard Perséus, a painter who ran a private art school in Stockholm. He was accepted into the Antique school of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in 1881, but did not have the means to follow most of his contemporaries to Paris for further studies. Remaining in Stockholm, which supplied him most of his motifs, his first trip outside the Nordic countries would come in 1900, when he had already become well-established as a painter and his economic situation started to improve.