Carl Gustaf Pilo
The court painter who painted the coronation of Gustav III.
Carl Gustaf Pilo was court painter in Copenhagen and later returned to Sweden. His large, unfinished coronation picture hangs in the Nationalmuseum.
Carl Gustaf Pilo was born in Södermanland in 1711. His father was a painter, and Pilo learned the trade early. He studied at the drawing school in Stockholm and worked as a young portrait painter in Sweden before moving to Denmark around 1740.
In Copenhagen he had a distinguished career. He became court painter to King Frederick V and painted the royal family and the court many times. He became a teacher and later director of the new Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In the 1770s he fell into conflict at court and was forced to leave Denmark. He returned to Sweden and eventually settled in Stockholm.
In Sweden he received his best-known commission: to depict the coronation of Gustav III in Storkyrkan in 1772. He worked on the enormous painting from the early 1780s until his death in 1793 without finishing it. The work is now in the Nationalmuseum. It is both a historical record and a dreamlike vision, in which the king and the court emerge from a dim room in shimmering light.
Pilo painted with loose, free brushstrokes and a muted, silvery palette. The faces glow against dark backgrounds, recalling Rembrandt and other Dutch masters. His style differs from the more polished French Rococo represented by Roslin.
In Denmark Pilo is regarded as one of the most important portrait painters of the 18th century, and many of his works are in Danish palaces and museums. In Sweden the coronation picture has become an icon of the Gustavian era.