Alfred Jansson (1863–1931)

Alfred Jansson, from a photograph reproduced in Ernst W. Olson, ed., History of the Swedes in Illinois. Part 1 (Chicago, 1908).

Born in Vermland, Sweden, Alfred Jansson studied art in Stockholm, Oslo, and Paris. He immigrated to America and settled in Chicago in 1889, but he did not become a U. S. citizen until 1922. Jansson continued his art studies in his adopted city and painted murals in the Swedish Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. For more than two decades, beginning in 1898, he was a prolific exhibitor in the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual exhibitions, showing landscape paintings exclusively. Jansson worked mainly in oils and occasionally in watercolors and pastel. His subjects, rarely specified in his titles, were drawn from the Chicago region as well as from his native country, which he revisited at least once, in the early 1920s. He was particularly noted for his winter scenes, one of which earned him the Art Institute’s Clyde M. Carr Prize in 1914.

Jansson belonged to such local organizations as the Palette and Chisel Club, the Chicago Society of Artists, and the Artists Guild, but he was particularly active in Chicago’s community of Swedish-born artists. He was a juror for the first and only exhibition of the short-lived Swedish-American Art Association, in 1905, and between 1911 and 1924, he participated in the annual Exhibition of Works by Swedish-American Artists at the Swedish Club of Chicago, of which he and Arvid Nyholm were founding members. Jansson was one of seven artists who painted murals in the Swedish Club’s banquet hall, a project completed in 1922. He was represented in American Painters of Swedish Descent, an exhibition that traveled to New York and three cities in Sweden before appearing at the Art Institute in 1920.

Two of Jansson’s landscapes were included in the art exhibition at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. At Thurber’s Art Galleries in Chicago, he was the subject of a solo show in 1916 and a joint exhibition (with Charles Warren Eaton) in 1918, both of which were covered in feature articles in the Chicago-based Fine Arts Journal. “His work is imbued with poetry,” noted one reviewer, “and carries that rich quality which is so much loved by the devotees of the modern landscape school.”[i] Another solo exhibition followed in 1922, at J. W. Young Galleries, and in 1932 the Midland Club hosted a memorial display of his landscape paintings that prompted Chicago Tribune critic Eleanor Jewett to call Jansson “one of the finest portrayers of snow we have ever had.”[ii]

[i] Dalzelle Harry Hatfield, “The Jansson-Eaton Exhibition,” Fine Arts Journal 36 (May 1918): 34.

[ii] Eleanor Jewett, “Current Exhibits Intrigue and Interest,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 13, 1932.

Alfred Jansson, Still Life, dated [18]93
Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches

Alfred Jansson, Still Life, dated [18]93

In Alfred Jansson’s still-life painting, an assortment of potted plants is set on a wood surface against an undefined mottled-gray background. The bright pink blossoms of an azalea and the red and white potted tulip are oriented toward muted light penetrating the scene from the upper right. The tulip’s long, slender leaves contrast with the shiny, round, slightly frilled foliage of a begonia spilling from a pale bowl decorated with painted flowers in dull red. At the left, the tendrils of an unidentified vinelike plant cling to the upright azalea; a similar plant occupies a clay pot in the shadowy background on the right. Jansson’s casual, evident brushwork and the cool colors of the leaves in the foreground, especially the hints of gray in the tulip foliage and the light-blue highlights on the begonia, are the hallmarks of a “modern” style of painting that was in vogue in the 1890s.

This still life may be the only such attributed to Jansson, who devoted his career to landscapes. The artist took care to sign it, adding “Chicago 93.” The flowering plants suggest he painted it in early spring—perhaps only weeks before the official opening of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in May 1893. At the fair, the Swedish Building featured two large landscape murals completed by Jansson for a commission that confirmed the young painter’s professional credibility. His modest still life, with its casual assortment of plants associated with an ordinary spring garden, seems far removed from that ambitious project. Yet in precisely noting the place and date of its creation, Jansson associated this work with a historic moment in both the life of his adopted city and his own nascent career.