Nils Kreuger
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In the summer of 1886 the newly married Swedish artist Nils Kreuger and his wife decided to leave Paris to move to Bourg-la-reine which lay, as he wrote home in a letter, two hours brisk walk straight south from Paris’ southern city gate. Today the district is a modern Paris suburb. They rented a house on Grand rue, the main road, which is the main country road between Paris and Orleans. It is from this road the motif for the painting is fetched. Indeed, Nils Kreuger simply went out through the front door to the pavement, that close to the motif.
What does the painting represent? It is an everyday scene with some of the many horse drawn wagons and personal transports that all day and night passed by the house they lived in. The picture is painted in standing format which emphasises movement. It is just prior to August, trees have begun to yellow and it is a rainy day. The horse wagons reflect on the wet road. If you look carefully you can see a woman, furthest away on the right pavement, holding an open umbrella. It is still raining a little, but the worst is over. We can see that it has rained a lot if we notice the scrap that has been washed into the gutter furthest down in the painting.
The artist kept a sketch in oil paint all his life, not bigger than an A4 page, that he used for our painting. It is an impressionistic moment quickly painted without details. The painting itself was executed inside the house in his studio where he added details not in the sketch, for example the paraffin lamp on the horse wagon to the left and street lights to the right. These details were added to create atmosphere. Nils Kreuger was an emotional person. There is also a serious tone in the painting that reflects the artist’s social interest in everyday life. In this case, agricultural labourers grinding life with work loads to and from Paris in horse drawn wagons.
At the end of the 1880’s the Kreuger family, now including a little daughter, moved home to Sweden. First they settled in Varberg, and from that period in time there is another painting in the museum, called “Septemberdag” (“September day”), but that looks completely different than the painting with the country road through Bourg-la-reine.
