"Solitude"

This landscape, with its misty twilight, is typical of René Ménard, and of Symbolism, a movement that began to emerge in the 1880s and 1890s. The painting was shown at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1897, which also featured works by Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet. But it was Ménard’s painting that was bought by the Nationalmuseum. The suggestion of buying the work for the museum came from the painter Georg von Rosen. The melancholic mood conveyed by Ménard’s landscapes is also definitely related to that of Swedish painting at the turn of the 19th century.