Gustav III builds at Haga
Gustav III has a pavilion built at Haga, decorated after models from Pompeii, while a large palace is planned. The palace is never finished before the king is assassinated in 1792.
The Gustavian style became Sweden’s own neoclassicism, light and restrained.
Gustav III became king in 1771 and the following year seized power from the Estates in a coup d’état. He was a king of culture who founded academies, built an opera house and wrote plays, and he wanted Sweden to keep pace with European taste. He bought Haga, on Brunnsviken north of Stockholm, early in his reign and made it his private retreat. There Fredrik Magnus Piper, who had studied garden design in England, laid out a landscape park with winding paths, sheets of water and viewpoints instead of the straight axes that had characterised the French Baroque garden. The king’s journey to Italy in 1783–1784 gave him new impressions of the ancient finds.
The pavilion was built from 1787 to designs by the architect Olof Tempelman, but it is the interiors by Louis Masreliez that have made it famous. The small building contains only a few rooms, among them a mirrored salon opening onto the water and a bedroom where the king liked to work. The walls have delicate ornament, pilasters and painted panels in light colours after ancient models. In the park, pavilions were built in Chinese and Turkish taste, an Echo Temple and the so-called Copper Tents, guard buildings shaped like a Roman military camp. The great palace was designed by Louis Jean Desprez. The foundations were laid, but after the assassination construction was halted, and the ruin remains.
The Gustavian style spread from the court to manor houses, parsonages and middle-class homes. It is characterised by straight lines, sparing ornament, light colours such as pearl grey and pale blue, and furniture with straight fluted legs. Because the country was poorer than France, its forms were often simpler, in painted wood rather than gilding, and that is perhaps why the style is seen as particularly Swedish. Around 1900 it was rediscovered by artists and architects who saw it as a national tradition, and it has lived on in Swedish interior design ever since. A palace was later built at Haga for the children of Gustav IV Adolf, and today it is the home of the Crown Princess.