A god eating his child on the wall of a dining room, a severed head painted on a parade shield, skeletons tending a garden: eight paintings that have unsettled viewers for centuries, and what their painters meant by them.

Julia Beck was one of the very few women of her generation to earn a living from her art, and she did it in France. Born in Stockholm in 1853, she turned the quiet river reflections and water lilies of Grez-sur-Loing into the center of her work. How a bookbinder daughter became a plein-air landscape painter, and why France remembered her before Sweden did.