Egel Stutt's Solitary Painting
“I should have been a reindeer herder like my grandfather, a real man!”
Heaibmu and Sahka Stutt had one child, a boy named Egel. Heaibmu was strong and ugly, Sahka was strong and plain, and they died the day after Egel turned sixteen. They taught the boy three things: the Torne Sami dialect, or a peculiar manner of it, how to be outside in the very cold and the very dark, and how to mutter curses and blessings.1
The night his parents died Egel stayed out in the cold, where he saw no visions and heard no voices, and when the sun came up he tried to say what his father had said every morning, “I should have been a reindeer herder like my grandfather, a real man!” But he could not say it with any conviction, and so he headed to Stockholm to make a life. Stockholm! Wondrous city! Metropolis! Home of his cousin Pjettar! Yes, he was certain he could make a life there.
And he did, in his own manner. Pjettar gave him a couch to sleep on and got him a job washing dishes at the Grand Hotel on the peninsula Blasieholmen. The kitchen fed him two meals, and he walked to and from work, in all weather.
After one year in Stockholm he rented his own apartment. The morning after his first night in the new apartment he left for work early and arriving so early he walked past the Grand Hotel to wander the peninsula Blasieholmen. And so discovered the Nationalmuseum. Before the Nationalmuseum Egel had never seen a painting or a picture of a painting. What things in this life! Paintings! And when he saw the paintings of Anders Zorn he never wanted to look at anything else.
Every day for three months Egel left his apartment early to stand before the works of Zorn. Glorious days on the peninsula Blasieholmen! And after three months he bought himself a canvas and paints and palette and brushes and easel. He arranged them before his single window and began to paint his single painting, the only painting he would ever paint, a landscape of the scene outside his window in which the the city seems to sit within itself and the technique, though primitive, prefigures or pre-realizes the landscapes of Balthus and the paintings of a future age in which man, without axe or sons, is supplanted by beasts and retreats beyond the threshold of his dwelling.
Kättilbjörn "Lev" Bengtsson, the only Swedish art critic worth drinking with,2 says Egel Stutt's painting has the perspective of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, if old Pieter were a time traveler from the 23rd Century who visited the Renaissance to study only the manufacture of door handles. Clement Greenberg discusses the painting in correspondence with Leo Verncraw and in uncharacteristically scatological language. The painting appears 39 times in the index of Merv Brostern’s collected prose and twice in the uncollected prose of Ernst Gombrich.
It was shown in a gallery in Fittja long enough to inspire a school of painters in Jokkmokk.3 It was purchased by an anonymous private collector, whose identity is known to the BRB. I have seen the painting in person. No photographs or reproductions exist.
For example, Sahka would mutter May God forgive you! whenever asked to pay for something or St. Nicholas forget you! when asked to clean.
But don’t let him talk you into a game of cards!
City of mystery!