Nils Kreuger

Nils Kreuger
Richard Bergh, Public domain

Painter of horses and Öland.

Nils Kreuger was one of the painters of the Varberg school and depicted horses, the landscapes of Öland and deserted roads.

Nils Kreuger was born in 1858 in Kalmar. He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and in the early 1880s travelled to France. There he painted at the artists’ colony in Grez-sur-Loing together with other young Swedes and learned plein-air painting.

He was one of the Opponents in 1885 and belonged to the core of the Artists’ Association. During the 1890s he lived in Varberg together with Karl Nordström and Richard Bergh. In the spirit of the Varberg school he simplified the landscape into large areas and clear lines.

Kreuger’s favourite subject was horses. He painted them in paddocks, on deserted roads and in the muted light of spring and autumn. He returned again and again to Öland, where the low horizons, windmills and stone walls suited his way of constructing pictures. He often worked in tempera and with a subdued, harmonious range of colour.

He also made drawings and illustrations, and his pictures of horses became very popular. Many of his works are in the Nationalmuseum, the Gothenburg Museum of Art and the Kalmar Art Museum.

Kreuger died in 1930 in Stockholm. He is regarded as one of the most personal landscape painters in Swedish art of the 1890s, with a quiet and often melancholy tone.