Helmer Osslund

Helmer Osslund
Scanned by user AlphaZeta, photographer unknown, Public domain

The painter of Norrland.

Helmer Osslund painted the rivers and mountains of Norrland in strong, decorative colours. He had worked in Gauguin’s circle and at the Gustavsberg porcelain factory.

Helmer Osslund was born in 1866 in the parish of Tuna in Medelpad, not far from Sundsvall. He grew up in Norrland and started work at an early age. In the 1880s he worked at the Gustavsberg porcelain factory, where he decorated porcelain and gained a grounding in craft and form.

He then travelled to Paris, where he came into contact with Paul Gauguin and his circle. The encounter with Gauguin’s synthetist style, with its simplified forms and pure areas of colour, proved decisive for him.

Osslund’s great subject was the nature of Norrland: the rivers, mountains, bogs and forests. He liked to paint them in autumn, with glowing yellow, red and blue against dark mountains. The landscapes are simplified and decorative, but they rest on a deep knowledge of nature. He travelled widely in Norrland, not least along the Indalsälven river and in the mountains, and depicted the landscape in every season.

He found it hard to make a living and long lived in straitened circumstances. In time, however, he won recognition, and his pictures helped to shape the image of Norrland as a magnificent national landscape.

Osslund died in 1938. He is regarded as one of the most individual Swedish landscape painters around the turn of the century and as a link between French Symbolism and Swedish National Romanticism.