Washington’s National Gallery of Art (NGA) recently acquired a portrait of Pierre Louis Alexandre painted by Swedish artist and designer Karin Bergoo Larsson in 1879–80, while she was studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm.
Around 40 portraits of art academy model Alexandre exist—and Bergoo Larsson’s is the best known. Many of the portraits show him dressed in exotic costumes, as per the Orientalist style of painting that flourished in the 19th century. This was when Western artists delighted in depicting—sometimes realistic and often fantastical—everyday scenes and landscapes of the East.
Bergoo (1859–1928), her name at the time, painted a contemplative Alexandre, who almost fills the picture frame against an azure sky. He’s casually perched on the edge of his seat, hugging one knee, a pose not foreign to dock workers waiting for ships to come in.
Monica L. Miller, who is Barnard College’s Ana Whitney Olin professor of Africana Studies, wrote: “Although [Bergoo] seemingly includes an element of the ‘Moor’s’ costume (the sash), she transforms it into the uniform of a sailor or a denizen of the docks, which was [Alexandre’s] occupation, marrying it to the red-striped pants and rolling his shirt sleeves. … [Bergoo’s painting is] a study of his quiet strength, possible only through, one supposes, a palpable sympathy between sitter and artist.”
Pierre Louis Alexandre
Alexandre (circa 1843–1905) was probably born enslaved in Cayenne, French Guiana, in South America. He likely took the arduous voyage to Stockholm as a trading ship stowaway, spending some two to three months at sea.
In 1863, Alexandre arrived in Stockholm. Adopting the Swedish surname “Pettersson,” he worked on the docks as a stevedore, unloading coal and grain, and modeled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1878 to 1903.
Karin Bergoo Larsson
In Stockholm, Bergoo first went to the Handicraft School and then the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1877 to 1882. In 1882, she joined an artists’ colony in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing, nearly 45 miles south of Paris. There, she met her husband, the popular Swedish painter Carl Larsson.
Bergoo Larsson devoted herself to her family. When the couple had children, she diverted her artistic talents to the home: designing furniture, weaving soft furnishings, and making clothes for herself and their children. Her home designs incorporated folk techniques and Japanese style motifs.
Her husband illustrated every aspect of their family life. Through his brush, we can see their children playing and mischief-making, and his wife tending their baby and doing chores—all within the colorful, harmonious home that she had created for them.
After Bergoo Larsson retired her paint palette, she became a household name for Scandinavian home decor and design.
