A PAIR OF GREAT CORMORANTS AMONGST ICE
signed and dated Rolf Mellström 1916 lower right
oil on canvas
80 x 148 cm; 31 1/2 x 58 1/2in
94 x 160cm; 37 x 63in (framed)

Exhibited
Stockholm, Konstnärshuset, Harald Klinckowström och Rolf Mellström. Utställning af landskap och djurmålningar (Exhibition of landscapes and animal paintings), 1916, no. 27

Mellström completed the present distinctively modernist painting of two cormorants amidst ice flows following his first visit to the Faroe Islands in 1915. The canvas is a highwater mark in Mellström's work and was one of twenty shown to wide acclaim in his joint exhibition in Stockholm in 1916 with fellow naturalist painter Harald Klinckowström (1897-1973), son of Baron Axel Klinckowström (1867-1936), the leading zoologist, Arctic and Antarctic explorer and writer.

The exhibition followed Mellström's attendance at Caleb Althin’s School of Painting in Stockholm (1911-14), time under the eye of painter Gunnar Hallström (1915-16) and regular study with the acknowledged master of Swedish wildlife painting Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939).

The markedly wide format of the canvas and emphatic horizontal composition was a style Hallström favoured, while the broken facture of the paint surface suggests the influence on Mellström of leading Swedish modernist Axel Törneman (1880-1925). Gradually, however, Mellström's practice became closer to that of the elder Liljefors as he specialised in capturing the sea birds and wildlife of Sweden's multitudinous archipelagos, and following the elder artist's death, Mellström was hailed as his worthy successor and Sweden's premier living bird and wildlife painter.

Cormorants, part of seafaring folklore for generations, are often viewed with mixed emotions. Their distinctive profile with wings spread out to dry conjour the form of a cross. Amongst some Nordic cultures the birds were thought to contain the souls of those lost at sea, while in certain coastal communities they were credited with talismanic powers. But whatever the myths, over the years their voracious appetite for fish made them exceedingly unpopular with fishermen, and in Sweden by the beginning of the last century the birds had largely been hunted to extinction. But in the Faroes, where they were still plentiful around the islands' coast line, Mellström found a subject that inspired the present work. Indeed on the same trip he also met his wife to be, an islander from birth.