Field of Oats at Grez

When I am writing these words in Warsaw, where I live is ridiculously cold—its -14 in Celsius (3.2 F) and rather unexpected. I really miss spring, oh gosh. The Swedish artist Karl Nordström was a leading figure in the Swedish art world in the last decades of the 1800s. Nils Kreuger, one of Nordström's old friends from the time at the Academy and in Perséus' school, had lived in the city of Varberg in France since 1888. He convinced Nordström to move there in 1892, and they were joined by another of their old friends, Richard Bergh, in 1893. He renewed his acquaintance with the work of Gauguin in Copenhagen in 1892, and with works by van Gogh, exhibited there the next year. His landscapes from Varberg and the Halland countryside were often characterized by the warm sunlight of dawn or dusk, the light Nordic summer nights and a progressively more synthetist style. In this painting you can see how he was influenced by the colors and lightness of the French Impressionism.