The hardship and endurance involved in Anna Boberg’s art were poetically encapsulated by the anthropologist and translator Hanna Astrup Larsen in 1913. Writing in the American periodical The Craftsman, Larsen described how: “For several months of each year this delicately nurtured woman of gay Stockholm braves such hardships as men endure in order to put a new dot on the map or plant the flag of their country where flag never waved before.” This was the era of Roald Amundsen and Captain Scott’s polar expeditions, but the flag Boberg planted was that of women painters and their fortitude in the pursuit of art.
By then, courtesy of an article in the Boston Daily Globe entitled – for effect rather than accuracy – “Barefoot in Polar Snow: Swedish Woman Artist Braves Cold for Arctic Effects”, Boberg (1864-1935) was already hailed as “Sweden’s greatest artist”. Although her reputation subsequently slipped behind contemporaries such as Anders Zorn, Carl Larsson and Hilma af Klint, she was undoubtedly the hardiest of the lot. For more than 30 years Boberg was more at home on the Lofoten archipelago, a group of isolated islands off the coast of Norway and more than 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, than in Stockholm or any of the capitals of Europe.
Content from our partners
