Prins Eugen
The painter prince of Waldemarsudde.
Prince Eugen was the son of Oscar II and one of the most important Swedish landscape painters of his day. His home, Waldemarsudde, is now a museum.
Prince Eugen was born in 1865 at Drottningholm Palace, the youngest son of King Oscar II and Queen Sophia. He studied at Uppsala University but wanted to become an artist, which was not an obvious path for a prince. His father eventually gave his consent, and in 1887 Eugen went to Paris to study painting, under Léon Bonnat and Henri Gervex among others.
In Paris he was influenced by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s large, tranquil murals and by French plein-air painting. Back in Sweden he made contact with the Opponents and became part of the Artists’ Association. He became friends with several of them and supported them as a collector and patron.
During the 1890s he became one of the leading figures of Swedish mood painting. The Old Castle of 1893, showing Tyresö Castle at dusk, and The Cloud of 1895, with a huge summer cloud over a landscape, are among his best-known works. Both are in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. He loved the landscapes of Uppland and Södermanland and often painted at dusk or under dramatic skies.
Prince Eugen was also a monumental painter. His frescoes in the Prince’s Gallery in Stockholm City Hall, with a view of the city by the water, were carried out in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1899 he bought Waldemarsudde on Djurgården, where Ferdinand Boberg designed his house, completed in 1905. There he collected Swedish and Nordic art, including works by Ernst Josephson and Edvard Munch.
He never married. He died in 1947 and bequeathed Waldemarsudde and its collections to the Swedish state. Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde is today one of Stockholm’s most visited art museums. He is remembered both as a painter and as one of the most important patrons of Swedish art.