Egron Lundgren

The travelling watercolourist.

Egron Lundgren travelled in Spain, India and England and painted watercolours of everyday life and historical events. He was a court painter to Queen Victoria.

Egron Lundgren was born in Stockholm in 1815. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and went to Paris in 1839 to continue his studies. He then lived for several years in Italy. He became one of the most widely travelled Swedish artists of his time.

In the late 1840s he went to Spain, where he stayed for several years. He painted lively watercolours of everyday life, bullfights, festivals and street scenes in Seville and other cities. The Spanish pictures became very popular, especially in England, where he moved in the 1850s.

In England Lundgren received commissions from Queen Victoria. He accompanied the British army to India at the time of the great uprising of 1857–58 and made a long series of watercolours of soldiers, people, landscapes and events. He also painted scenes from the life of the royal family. Later he also travelled to Egypt.

Lundgren was above all a watercolourist, and he was skilled at quickly capturing colour, light and movement. He also wrote travel accounts and memoirs. He returned to Stockholm and died there in 1875. He is regarded as one of the foremost Swedish watercolourists of the 19th century, and the Nationalmuseum has a large collection of his work.

• Romanticism
• Romanticism in Sweden