Emma Löwstedt
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Emma Löwstedt’s painting shows a woman collecting mussels on the beach in the little fishing village of Villerville in Normandie by the mouth of the river Seine in the summer of 1888. In a letter home to her family in Sweden she writes that she paints during the days out in the nature in front of the motif. In the evenings the artists went out together to the village inns.
Like so many other young artists, Emma Löwstedt travelled to Paris after her studies at the Stockholm Academy of Art. During the summers she left Paris and went out to the countryside around the city or to the coast, as did her fellow artists. There they painted what they themselves saw and experienced having been influenced by the impressionists’ ideas of defining visual reality. Many of the paintings executed on site in front of the motif are rather small in format. Large canvases were awkward to carry around. These small paintings are sort of on-the-spot pictures, but were sometimes used as sketches for larger paintings, realised in the studio during the winter months.
What we see in this painting is exactly what the artist saw. Women’s activities are portrayed. The men’s work was sea-fishing, and they were finished for the day now that the ebb-tide lay bare the mussel bank on the sand bottom. The women collecting mussels have typical clothes and baskets for their work. On the left in the background a horse and wagon transport the day’s catch, and the man in the middle carries a sail. His boat is probably already drying on its side. We can’t see it, but we have our imagination.
The motif the artist has chosen is typical for the area. A guide book from the period states that Villerville has a natural mussel bank that is the source of the village prosperity. As soon as it is laid bare by the tide, hundreds of women in clogs wander out with baskets of various size. They collect mussels with a special tool called etiquette. When one sees the women from a distance, chattering and leaping, they look like a flock of seagulls, it says in the guide book.
Emma Löwstedt actively participated in exhibition life, both in France and Sweden. In contrast to many other Swedish artists she remained in France until her death in 1932.
