9 min read
Ernst Josephson painted David and Saul in 1878: the shepherd musician of the First Book of Samuel playing to relieve King Saul's madness. Exactly a decade later, in the summer of 1888, the Swedish painter suffered a psychotic breakdown diagnosed as schizophrenia, and his professional career ended at 37.
Few biographies in art history fold back on themselves so cruelly. Picture the island of Bréhat off the Breton coast in 1888: a painter at the height of his powers attending séances, hearing voices, signing new work with the names of dead artists. Now rewind ten years to a Paris studio, where that same man, 27 years old and a prize-winning student of Jean-Léon Gérôme, chose to paint the oldest story we have about music healing a broken mind. He could not have known he was painting his own future.
1 Samuel 16: The Harp That Calmed a Tormented King
The source is the First Book of Samuel. An evil spirit torments King Saul, and his servants fetch a young shepherd from Bethlehem who plays the lyre. Whenever the darkness descends, David plays, and the king is relieved. It is arguably the earliest written account of music used as therapy for mental illness, and painters have returned to it for centuries. Rembrandt treated the same subject in his Saul and David, now held at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which makes the comparison of Josephson's David and Saul vs Rembrandt's version a natural exercise for anyone studying how different eras imagined the scene.
So what is the meaning of David and Saul? On the surface, the triumph of art over mental darkness. Read against Josephson's life, it becomes something closer to prophecy. The painter who gave form to a king's torment in 1878 would know that torment from the inside by 1888. The painting asks a question its maker would eventually have to answer alone: can art reach a mind that is coming apart?
David and Saul, Ernst Josephson, 1878. View print options
Stockholm to Paris: A Career Built by 1878
Who was Ernst Josephson? Born in Stockholm on 16 April 1851 to a Jewish merchant family, he lost his father at ten and was raised by his mother and three older sisters. At sixteen he enrolled at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, studying under Johan Christoffer Boklund and August Malmström until 1876, when he left with a Royal Medal for painting. Then came the travels every ambitious Scandinavian needed: Italy, Germany and the Netherlands with his friend Severin Nilsson, studying the Old Masters at the source. Nordic painters had followed this route for generations, as the career of Johan Christian Dahl shows, the Norwegian landscape painter who built his reputation in Dresden while sharing a house with Caspar David Friedrich.
Paris was the breakthrough. Josephson studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts, shared a studio with Hugo Birger and built a reputation painting portraits of his fellow Swedes in France. The year 1878 was remarkably productive. Alongside the biblical gravity of David and Saul, he painted Nymph and Faun, a mythological scene whose pagan sensuality could hardly be further from the Old Testament. The two works, made in the same year by the same hand, measure the full span of his imagination at 27.
Nymph and Faun, Ernst Josephson, 1878. View print options
Seville With Anders Zorn, 1881 to 1882
The year 1881 broke something in him. His mother, Gustafva, who had raised him alone since he was ten, died. By then syphilis had already begun to shadow his private life, forcing him to abandon his courtship of the young model Ketty Rindskopf. He went south. From 1881 to 1882 Josephson travelled to Seville with his friend Anders Zorn, and the trip changed his painting.
Out of that Andalusian period came Spanish Dance (1882), a work that trades the studio solemnity of his Paris years for movement, heat and performance. It belongs to a long northern European fascination with Spanish spectacle. Alfred Dehodencq, the French Romantic who went to Spain to recover from a wound suffered in the 1848 Paris uprising and stayed for years painting its religious processions, had mined the same vein three decades earlier. For Josephson, grieving and ill, the dance subject reads as its own kind of self-medication: motion against melancholy, just as David's harp worked against Saul's.
Spanish Dance, Ernst Josephson, 1882. View print options
Paris, 1883: Fürstenberg's Money and a Rejected Masterpiece
Relief arrived in 1883, when the Gothenburg merchant and collector Pontus Fürstenberg became his patron. Financial backing let Josephson paint what he wanted. That year he produced July 14, taking the French national holiday as his subject, a painter from neutral Sweden recording the republican festivity of his adopted city. The canvas captures a Paris that his portraits of expatriate Swedes never showed: France celebrating itself.
July 14, Ernst Josephson, 1883. View print options
The establishment, meanwhile, kept its door shut. Strömkarlen (1882 to 1884), his painting of the water sprite of Scandinavian folklore and now counted among his masterpieces, was rejected by the Nationalmuseum. In 1885 he joined the Opponenterna, the group protesting the outmoded teaching at the Swedish Academy, though his enthusiasm faded after he failed to win election to its governing board. Rejection was accumulating. So was the disease.
Île-de-Bréhat, 1888: The Summer the Mind Gave Way
By the summer of 1888 the delusions and hallucinations had begun. Josephson was living on the Île-de-Bréhat in Brittany, where he had spent the previous summer with the painter and engraver Allan Österlind and his family. There he fell into spiritism, possibly encouraged by Österlind's interest in occult phenomena. In visionary states he wrote poems and made paintings that he signed with the names of dead artists, convinced he was their instrument rather than his own.
Österlind brought him home to Sweden. Josephson was admitted to Ulleråkers sjukhus, a mental institution in Uppsala, where he remained for several months. The public career was finished; he was 37. Yet the strangest fact of his biography is this: some of his best known and most influential works date from the illness years. The man who had painted music reaching through a king's madness kept painting from inside his own, as if testing whether the cure he depicted in 1878 actually worked. He died in Stockholm on 22 November 1906.
Prince Eugen's Purchase and the Verdict at Waldemarsudde
History reversed the Nationalmuseum's verdict. Prince Eugen, himself a trained painter and serious patron, bought the rejected Strömkarlen and hung it at Waldemarsudde, his home on Djurgården in Stockholm. Waldemarsudde is now a museum, and its collection holds ten additional Josephson oils and a large number of his drawings. The rejected outsider became a cornerstone of Swedish art, his illness-period work in particular prized by later generations for its raw, unguarded invention. Artists whose subjects gain their fame late are a recurring story in this period; Turner's moonlit Alnwick Castle waited over 150 years before the castle he painted became Hogwarts on film and sent new audiences back to the watercolour.
On a wall today, David and Saul carries all of this weight. Its subject, music against madness, and its brooding biblical register make it a natural anchor among dark academia art prints, and a David and Saul print suits a study or music room better than almost any work we carry: it is literally a picture about what music does to the mind. If this story moved you, two companions belong in the same room. Nymph and Faun, painted the same year, shows what Josephson's imagination looked like before the shadow fell, and Spanish Dance preserves the Seville months when movement still held the darkness off. In a compact space a modest format keeps the drama intimate; a larger Ernst Josephson wall art print lets the 1878 canvas command the room the way the story deserves.
Ernst Josephson's originals are under museum glass. Yours can be on your wall this week.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does Ernst Josephson's David and Saul depict?
It depicts the episode from the First Book of Samuel in which the young shepherd David plays music to relieve King Saul's torment. Painted in 1878, it is one of the earliest stories ever recorded of music used to treat mental affliction.
Where can you see Ernst Josephson's paintings today?
Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde on Djurgården in Stockholm holds his masterpiece Strömkarlen along with ten additional oil paintings and a large number of drawings. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Sweden's national gallery, also holds works by Josephson.
Why did Ernst Josephson's career end in 1888?
By the summer of 1888 he was suffering delusions and hallucinations while living on the Île-de-Bréhat in Brittany. He was brought back to Sweden and admitted to Ulleråkers sjukhus in Uppsala, and he never resumed a public career.
What did Josephson paint during his illness?
In visionary states he wrote poems and made paintings that he signed with the names of dead artists, believing he was their medium. Some of his best known and most influential works were created during this period.
How did Ernst Josephson influence later art?
His illness-period drawings and paintings, raw and unconstrained by academic rules, were embraced by later generations and proved influential in Scandinavian art. The once-rejected Strömkarlen is now considered a masterpiece of Swedish painting.
Eleanor Hart
Eleanor Hart writes about European painting for Symbol Art Gallery. She chases the small stories behind big landscapes, and still thinks one brushstroke can change a room.
