Per Hasselberg
The Frog and Grandfather.
Per Hasselberg was one of the great Swedish sculptors of the 19th century. His The Frog and The Snowdrop combined French sculpture with Swedish sensibility.
Per Hasselberg was born in 1850 and grew up in poor circumstances in southern Sweden. He began as an apprentice to an ornamental carver and so came to the profession through craft. He then studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm during the 1870s.
In 1876 he travelled to Paris, where he stayed for about ten years. He studied under the sculptor François Jouffroy and was influenced by the soft, lifelike modelling of French sculpture. In Paris he created The Snowdrop in 1881, a young naked girl crouching like a flower that has just opened. The work was shown at the Paris Salon and attracted great attention.
Hasselberg’s strength was his ability to make stone and bronze look like warm, living skin. He combined French elegance with subjects from Nordic nature and folklore. His best-known work is The Frog of 1889, a young woman squatting like an animal about to leap. Both The Snowdrop and The Frog are in the Nationalmuseum. Grandfather shows an old man with a small child and is among his best-loved works.
He was close to the Opponents and moved among the painters of the Swedish artists’ colony in Paris. His life was nonetheless marked by financial insecurity. He died as early as 1894, only 44 years old.
Hasselberg is regarded as the artist who renewed Swedish sculpture at the end of the 19th century. He showed that a Swedish sculptor could hold his own with the French masters, and he paved the way for the next generation, among them Christian Eriksson and Carl Milles.