Difficult Waters (1891) was the first in a series of paintings on the same subject in the 1890s: an aged sailor in yellow oilskins is studying a blueback chart in the cabin of a boat that is listing heavily in rough seas. The underside of the chart is bright blue, and Krohg has used the same blue to pick out the old man’s beard and his yellow oilskins—where the result is to render it greenish—and in the reflections in the table top. The painting brings to mind other Skagen artists’ work, which often depicted the fishermen’s hard life at sea. Krohg, however, generally painted interior scenes in fishermen’s homes when he was at Skagen, while this sea motif may instead have been inspired by his summer stays in Grimstad or Åsgårdstrand in Norway.
Philippa Nanfeldt from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
