Isaac i artilleriuniform (Au Café) (Isaac in artillery uniform -Au Café)

Military portraits go back a long time in history. Rulers have been immortalized in military dress since ancient times. Roman sculpture, for example, often depicted emperors and generals with armour and the short military tunic. Full-length, and equestrian, portraits of rulers and generals often showed them on the battlefield, but with the action in the distant background; a feature probably dating back to Titian’s (c. 1488/90 – 1576) magisterial “Equestrian Portrait of Charles V” (1548, oil on canvas, 335 x 283 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid), which shows the heavily armoured emperor after his victory at the Battle of Mühlberg (1547), but with no other soldiers present.

Monarchs were not often painted in military uniform until the Napoleonic period, but in the 19th century this became typical for formal military portraits (for monarchs and high-ranking officers alike), perhaps because the uniforms of the time became more and more visually striking and appealing. The stern formality of portraits like “Karl XIV Johan (1763 – 1844), King of Sweden and Norway” (1843, oil on canvas, 250 x 155 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) by Emile Mascré (active 1831 – 1844) and John Singer Sargent’s (1856 – 1925) “Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts” (1906, oil on canvas, 164 x 105 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London) illustrates well the ideals that surrounded large scale portraits of this kind.

A couple of interesting stylistic exceptions in the genre are to be found in James Tissot’s (1836 – 1902) small portrait of the (then) Captain in the Royal Horse Guards “Frederick Burnaby” (1870, oil on panel, 50 x 61, National Portrait Gallery, London) and Lucian Freud’s (1922 – 2011), larger than life depiction of Andrew Parker Bowles, “The Brigadier” (2004, oil on canvas, 224 x 138 cm, private collection, acquired at auction, Christie’s, New York, 2015 for $34.89 million). In both these, unconventional, portraits the depicted men can be seen lounging in relaxed positions, Brigadier Parker Bowles with protruding belly visible through his unbuttoned tunic and Captain Burnaby leaning back with a cigarette in his hand.

Sigrid Hjertén also depicted her beloved husband Isaac in a, fairly, relaxed environment (a Café in Stockholm) with a cigarette in his hand (like Fredrick Burnaby in the portrait by Tissot). The most striking feature, however, in this (also larger than life) portrait is the elegant artillery uniform, with its stiff high collar and shiny buttons in groups of three. Isaac did his military service at the Svea Artillery Regiment in 1912, where he was often being penalized because of his physical appearance (coming from a Jewish background). Despite this, he wore his elegant uniform with pride and in the eyes of his wife Sigrid, he wasn’t a tormented private soldier but rather a dashing, confident high-ranking aristocratic officer, enjoying a drink at the Café.

The impressive portrait was exhibited at the couple’s first joint exhibition, at Hallin’s art gallery in Stockholm, in 1913. Isaac had already exhibited several times, but for Sigrid it was, more or less, a debut. Sigrid’s portrait of her husband attracted a great deal of interest and was mentioned in at least three different reviews, not always in positive terms. The reviewer “Kajus”, for example, wrote:

Mrs. Hjertén exhibits, among other things, a colossal colour caricature of her master and husband dressed in uniform and enthroned in an armchair in the middle of the empty opera café. Thank you, Mrs Grünewald. The painting is really funny [...] But is it nice for a young wife to caricature her spouse in such a way?

Fortunately, there were other, more positive, opinions as well. Another reviewer, for example, chose to draw attention to how Hjertén had taken advantage of “the colouristic effect offered by her husband’s bright blue warrior garb”.

Provenance
Private collection, Sweden.
Stockholms Auktionsverk, “Moderna Kvalitén”, 27 April 2006, lot 864.
Private collection, Switzerland.
Firestorm Foundation.

Exhibitions
Hallins konsthandel, Stockholm, 1912.
Konstakademien (Royal Academy of Arts), Stockholm, “Sigrid Hjertén – oljemålningar och gouacher 1911 - 1936”, April 1936.
Skånska Konstmuseum, Akademiska Föreningen, Lund, Sweden, ”Sigrid Hjertén”, 16 – 25 April 1938, no. 4.
Riksförbundet för bildande konst, Stockholm, vandringsutställning 67, ”Sigrid Hjertén. Minnesutställning”, 1949, no. 3.
Liljevalchs konsthall (Liljevalchs Public Art Gallery), Stockholm, “Sigrid Hjertén”, 17 March - 28 May 1995.
Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, Isaac Grünewald – Konst och teater / Art and Theatre, 3 September 2022 – 12 February 2023, no. 104.

Literature
Anders Wahlgren, Sigrid Hjertén – en av Sveriges främsta konstnärer, 2008, mentioned and illustrated in colour, p. 58.
Görel Cavalli – Björkman, Kvinna i avantgardet. Sigrid Hjertén- Liv och verk, 2017, mentioned and illustrated in colour, p. 84.
(Eds.) Karin Sidén and Carina Rech, Isaac Grünewald – Konst och teater / Art and Theatre, exhibition catalogue, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, 2022, illustrated full page in colour, p. 60.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation