Julius Kronberg
The Academy’s decorator.
Julius Kronberg painted large mythological pictures and ceiling paintings, including in the Royal Palace in Stockholm and the Hallwyl Palace.
Julius Kronberg was born in 1850 in Karlskrona. He came to Stockholm at an early age and studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. He then continued his training in Düsseldorf and Munich, which were at the time Europe’s great schools of academic history painting.
His breakthrough came with Hunting Nymph and Fauns of 1875, a sensuous mythological picture that is now in the Nationalmuseum. The painting won him scholarships and a long stay in Rome. There he painted large figure compositions with subjects from antiquity and the Bible, among them David and Saul of 1885, also in the Nationalmuseum.
Kronberg was faithful to the academic tradition. He worked with precise drawing, rich colours and theatrical gestures, in a style reminiscent of Baroque ceiling painting. When the Opponents demanded realism and plein-air painting in the 1880s, he stood on the other side. Instead he became the obvious choice when churches and palaces needed large decorations.
From the 1890s he devoted himself mainly to monumental painting. He executed ceiling paintings in the Royal Palace in Stockholm and in the Hallwyl Palace, and also painted for the Adolf Fredrik Church in Stockholm. His studio, with its tall windows and large canvases, was moved after his death to Skansen, where it can be visited today.
Kronberg died in 1921. For a long time he was seen as a representative of the old order that the modernists left behind. Today he is more appreciated as a skilled craftsman and as one of the last Swedish painters to master the large decorative format.