August Strindberg (1849-1912) is famous as a writer, the author of numerous novels as well as more than seventy plays, a man widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of expressionist drama. But his career as a painter, which he pursued largely in private – rather like that other literary centaur with painterly leanings, Victor Hugo – remains less well known. It forms the subject of a new exhibition at Tate Modern, inaugurating a series of displays which will take as their collective theme the melting pot of European painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The show is sparely hung but full of strange and often remarkable things, many of them seascapes, through which a chill Scandinavian wind blows. Strindberg always thought of himself as a peculiarly visual writer, even going so far as to describe writing as “painting with words”, and he was considerably more attuned to the innovations of his contemporaries, the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists and Symbolists, than most professional art critics of his time. (In 1895, when his friend Paul Gauguin asked him to write an essay for the catalogue of an exhibition of his paintings, Strindberg responded with such an elegant missive of refusal that Gauguin simply published the letter instead.) The exhibition at Tate Modern does not prove that Strindberg was an out-and-out genius with the brush – or palette knife, which was his preferred tool of execution – but it demonstrates his extreme sensitivity both to nature, and to the climate of avant-garde art.

Strindberg was born in Stockholm, the third of twelve children. His father was a none too prosperous shipping agent, while his mother was the daughter of a tailor, who in her youth had worked as a domestic servant (hence the title of Strindberg’s autobiography, The Son...

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