Why Swedish mid-century paintings look the way they do

There's a likeness in a lot of our Swedish paintings, the red timber barns, birches turning gold in a forest, a soft sky over farmland, often painted thickly, with real confidence. Most of the painters behind these pictures were never famous and not many of them are well known in the UK. Swedish vintage art is distinctive and I fell in love with sourcing mid-century pieces the first time I visited Malmo in Sweden.

So why does Swedish art look the way it does?

The light

Stockholm sits close to the 60th parallel. On the longest day of the year it gets around eighteen hours of daylight and on the shortest, just over six. Summer evenings go on and on, with the light hanging in the sky long after you'd expect and winter days are over almost before they've started.

In the 1890s three Swedish painters who had trained in Paris (Karl Nordström, Nils Kreuger and Richard Bergh) worked together in Varberg on the west coast, determined that their paintings should feel Swedish rather than international. The Varberg school, as they became known, simplified the landscape into areas of colour with dark outlines and painted twilight scenes that were more about mood than about documenting a view.

 

Iconic red houses

More than two thirds of Sweden is forest land, according to Statistics Sweden, so it's hardly surprising that pine, spruce and birch fill so many of these paintings, or that the forest floor is so often painted.. In Woodland Stream, by Swedish painter Karin Borgström, tall trees crowd either side of a stream in thick palette knife impasto. Forest Pines is another, a small forest clearing of tall pine trunks and boulders.

Then there are the red houses. The red on Swedish barns and cottages is called 'Falu red', after a paint made from the waste of the copper mine at Falun. Red-painted timber houses are mentioned as far back as the 1500s, when they were a sign of wealth, and organised production of the pigment began in 1764. In the 1700s red was still a status symbol but because the paint protects the wood so well it gradually spread to ordinary farms and cottages. By the late 1800s painters like Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn had helped turn the red cottage into something iconic.

So when a mid-century painter puts a red barn in a green field, as Svän Grandin does in Nordic Autumn, or fills a canvas with them, as in Red Houses, they're painting the countryside as it really looked.

Lessons from Paris

A lot of Swedish painters travelled to Paris in the early twentieth century, and they came home painting differently.

Between 1908 and 1911, around forty of them studied at the academy run by the French artist Henri Matisse. There they learned a bolder way of working: rich colour, and big blocks of one shade set against another. Back in Stockholm in 1909, a group of them launched themselves as De unga, "The Young Ones".

That new confidence with colour spread to Gothenburg too. One of Matisse's pupils took over the city's art school in 1920 and the painters who trained there became known as the Gothenburg colourists. Their colour was warm and intense, and their shapes were often kept simple. Ragnar Falk, whose still life we have, was painting in the same city in those same years.

Another popular teacher in Paris was André Lhote. Around two hundred Swedish artists studied with him over the years, and he gave Swedish painting a cubist edge: landscapes and still lives built from flat, angled shapes, almost like a puzzle. You can see it in Cubist Coast, signed B.Petersson and dated 1958, a coastal village of geometric rooftops.

Put it all together and you get the thing you will notice in so many of our paintings: confident colour and simple, bold shapes. Golden Fields, signed by Christian Bignér, is a lovely example. A winding road through farmland, painted in flat blocks of gold, ochre and burnt orange.

Art for every home

So why is there so much good artwork to find in Sweden? Sweden's first art association, or konstförening, was founded in Stockholm in 1832. Members paid a subscription and the association bought original works from living artists, which were then drawn by lottery, so anyone who joined had a chance of taking a real painting home.

Then, on 28 October 1940, the CAP chocolate factory in Gothenburg became home to Sweden's first workplace art association. It set out to get cheap mass-produced pictures out of Swedish homes, to support living Swedish artists and to help employees enjoy good art and it hung paintings in the factory lunch room. The idea spread fast.

In 1947 Konstfrämjandet was founded with a similar aim, bringing good art to people who had never bought it. Local associations gave painters a place to show their work, too, Svän Grandin made his debut in 1936 at the autumn salon of the art association for Borås and its surrounding district.

All of this meant that a great many original paintings ended up on the walls of ordinary Swedish homes.

Why they never left Sweden

These paintings were made for Swedish walls. They were shown in Swedish towns and bought through Swedish clubs. Today their work comes back onto the market at Swedish auctions, flea markets and second-hand shops, which is where I source them, often still in their original frame.

Browse our collection of Swedish art

I have a real love of Swedish art, so you’ll find a vast array of paintings and lithographs from Sweden in our collection. Browse all of our art here.