Saturday, July 14, 2018

Faces and Forms from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Martin Åberg
Self-portrait
1932
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Georg Engelhard Schröder
Study of hand with calipers
before 1750
oil on canvas, mounted on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Olof Södermark
Portrait of Signora Vincensa
ca. 1825
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

"Olof Södermark was one of many Swedish military officers during the first half of the 19th century who devoted themselves to artistic pursuits.  In the mid-1820s he spent some time in Rome, where he painted this portrait of a woman at a café.  The portrait is interesting in its total lack of the idealisation that otherwise characterised portraiture at that time."

– curator's notes from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Eva Bonnier
Study for portrait of artist Georg Pauli
ca. 1884-86
oil on canvas, mounted on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Gustaf Cederström
Figure-study
1871
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Amalia Lindegren
Figure-study
ca. 1850-60
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg
Portrait of Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen
1832
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Hugo Birger
Portrait of the artist's wife and sister-in-law
before 1887
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Carl Stefan Bennet
The sculptor Fogelberg's studio in Rome
1831
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Constantin Hansen
Model with flute among ruins
ca. 1826-27
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Robert Lundberg
Model having a cigarette
1890
oil on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Hugo Salmson
Portrait of unknown girl
before 1894
oil on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

"Hugo Salmson is an almost forgotten artist today, but in the 19th century he was highly successful, known among other things for his considerable technical ability.  This girl in a chair is painted with a skill that bears comparison with the more celebrated names of 19th-century art.  Salmson was sometimes criticised for a stiffness in his images, but that is scarcely the case here.  The technical precision of the painting combined with the girl's defiant look overshadows the admittedly rather arranged character of the portrait."

– curator's notes from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Ernst Josephson
Sketch for the Water Sprite
1905
oil on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Eugène Jansson
Athletes
1912
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Gustaf Sandberg
Five Old Masters
(Poussin, Raphael, Rubens, Dürer, Rembrandt)
before 1854
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Gustaf Sandberg based his five Old Master portraits on well-known individual self-portraits by each of these famous artists.  The image of Raphael, second from left, was based on that master's portrait of the banker Bindo Altoviti, on display in Munich since 1810 and widely believed in the 18th and 19th centuries to represent Raphael himself.  Art officials in Munich traded that portrait away in the 1930s, following its discrediting as a likeness of the artist.  Since 1943 this discarded masterpiece by Raphael (though not of Raphael) has been on continuous display at the National Gallery in Washington DC, where its subject is correctly identified.