Famous Swedish artists – from Albertus Pictor to Mamma Andersson

Some of the best-known Swedish artists are Albertus Pictor (church paintings in the 15th century), Alexander Roslin (portraits in Paris in the 18th century), Johan Tobias Sergel (sculpture), Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn and Bruno Liljefors (around 1900), Hilma af Klint (abstract painting from 1906), Sigrid Hjertén (Expressionism), Carl Milles (sculpture) and, in our own time, Karin Mamma Andersson. The app has pages for over a hundred Swedish artists, with their dates, period and where they worked.

Facts

Masters of the Middle Ages

The first Swedish artist we know by name was in fact German. Albertus Pictor, Albert the Painter, came from Immenhausen and was active in Stockholm from the 1460s until his death around 1509. He and his workshop painted vaults and walls in some thirty churches around Lake Mälaren, among them Täby, Härkeberga and Solna. His Death Playing Chess in Täby Church became world-famous through Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

At the same time Bernt Notke of Lübeck worked for a few years in Stockholm, where he made the sculptural group St George and the Dragon in Storkyrkan, inaugurated in 1489 and commissioned by Sten Sture. In the Middle Ages the art of Sweden was part of the culture of the Baltic and the Hanseatic League. Read more in The Swedish Middle Ages.

Court painters and portraitists

In the era of Sweden's Great Power, the court needed portraits and large decorative schemes, and David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, born in Hamburg, became court painter and is often called the father of Swedish painting. The Academy of Arts was founded in 1735 and gave the country its own training, but the best artists still went abroad.

Alexander Roslin from Malmö became one of Europe's most sought-after portrait painters in Paris, and The Lady with the Veil of 1768 is his best-known work. Ulrica Pasch became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1773 and supported her family as a portrait painter. The sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel studied the antique in Rome, where he made his Faun, and became court sculptor to Gustav III.

Romanticism, Düsseldorf and the Opponents

In the first half of the 19th century Carl Johan Fahlcrantz painted Swedish landscapes in the spirit of Romanticism, and by the middle of the century many were studying in Düsseldorf. From there came history painters such as Gustaf Cederström, known for The Funeral Procession of Charles XII.

Around 1880 a new generation began to study in Paris and to paint outdoors. They protested against the Academy of Arts and were called the Opponents. They include Ernst Josephson, who painted The Nix, Carl Fredrik Hill, whose drawings from his years of illness were later admired by the Modernists, Hanna Pauli, the animal painter Bruno Liljefors and Prince Eugen, whose home, Waldemarsudde, is now a museum. Read more in The Opponents and the 1890s.

The great names of the turn of the century

Two artists from this period are perhaps still the best known in Sweden today. Anders Zorn from Mora was an internationally sought-after portrait painter and etcher who painted American presidents, but also Dalecarlian girls, bathing women and Midsummer Dance. Carl Larsson painted the family home at Sundborn in watercolours that were published in the book Ett hem (A Home).

The home at Sundborn was as much Karin Larsson's work. She was a trained painter and designed textiles and furniture that became models for Swedish interior design. Both Zorngården in Mora and the Carl Larsson house can be visited. Here there is also a clear path on to the design section and Scandinavian design.

Pioneers of Modernism

Hilma af Klint painted abstract pictures from 1906, several years before Kandinsky, but wanted them to be shown only after her death. The Guggenheim Museum's exhibition of her work in 2018–2019 was the most visited in the museum's history. Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald studied under Matisse in Paris and were central when the group the Young Ones exhibited in 1909 and in the years after. Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, brought Cubism and Futurism to Sweden.

The sculptor Carl Milles became the best-known Swedish artist abroad in the interwar years, with works such as Poseidon on Götaplatsen in Gothenburg; his home, Millesgården on Lidingö, is a sculpture park. Read more about the period in The Young Ones and the breakthrough of Modernism.

After 1945 and today

After the war art became more political and more experimental. Siri Derkert carved images of peace and women's rights into the concrete of the Östermalmstorg metro station, completed in 1965: Carvings in Concrete. Öyvind Fahlström worked in New York and made moving picture-games and political maps of the Cold War, and Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd created Non-Violence, the revolver with a knotted barrel that stands outside the United Nations in New York. Read about the 1960s and 70s.

Among later generations are Lena Cronqvist, who paints childhood, motherhood and hospitals in a style both naive and merciless, Ola Billgren and Karin Mamma Andersson, who represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale in 2003. All have their own pages among the artists, where you can sort by country and period.

See them in context

A list of names does not tell you who learned from whom. In the app's network you can see the connections between the artists: teachers and pupils, friends and spouses, those who exhibited together. There you can see, for instance, how the Opponents are linked to Paris and how the Young Ones are linked to Matisse. The Swedish thread through history shows the periods in order.

If you want to see the works, read The most famous Swedish paintings and Art to see in Stockholm. Many of the women artists received recognition late; the guide to women artists through history tells more.

Telling them apart

Exercise

Which Swedish artist painted abstract pictures as early as 1906?