There has to be an enticement to become an artist if one or both of your parents or siblings is a successful painter. Maybe such a family connection is to do with artistic genes. My featured painter today had the perfect start on her road to an artistic future as her father and her maternal grandfather, Johan Gustaf Sandberg, were accomplished painters and must have nurtured her love of sketching and art when she was young. In my next blog I will look at the life and works of the talented daughter, the landscape painter, Anna Palm, later Anna Palm de Rosa, but today I want to concentrate on the talents of her father.
Gustaf William Palm was born in Norra Åsum, a small village close to the town of Kristianstad in Southern Sweden on March 14th 1810. He went to school in Kristianstad and when his regular schooling was completed in 1825 he picked up some work in Lund through the good auspices of a friend, Johan Rabbén, who arranged for him to complete some illustrations for a book on European algae written by Carl Agardh. In 1828, when Gustaf was eighteen years of age, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Stockholm.
Gustaf Palm was greatly influenced by the works of the acclaimed Swedish romantic landscape painter, Carl Johan Fahlcrantz, whose paintings were often in the form of a somewhat diffused romantic mood with warm, dark colours.
Another influential figure for Gustaf Palm was his Academy professor, and father-in-law, Johan Gustaf Sandberg, a foremost history painter whose works of art often depicted Norse mythology, folklore and Swedish history. One such painting was Gustav Vasa Speaks to the Dalecarlians at Mora, in which we see Gustav Ericksson trying to drum up support with the people of Dalarna in his fight against the Swedish king Christian II during the Swedish War of Liberation in 1521.
Whilst at the Academy Gustaf Palm received many awards for his work and was commissioned to produce illustrations for Sven Nilsson’s book, Skandinavisk Fauna and Sandberg’s illustrated book, One Year in Sweden. In the summer of 1833 Gustaf and fellow artist, Mikael Gustaf Anckarsvärd , travelled to Norway and Norrland on a painting trip and one of Gustaf Palm’s early paintings from this journey was entitled Motifs of Norway which he completed in 1835.
In 1837 Gustaf developed a problem with his eyes and travelled to Berlin to find a cure for the disease. En route he stopped off in Copenhagen where he met the Danish painter, J C Dahl. He remained in Berlin for a year before moving to Vienna in 1838. In Vienna he exhibited some of his work at the Vienna Academy of Arts. His art works depicting Scandanavian landscapes were very popular and the Austrian public deemed his rugged landscapes to be quite exotic and they sold well.
Gustaf Palm began to be influenced by the popular Austrian writer and landscape artist, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller whose work was in great demand at the time.
In 1840 Gustaf Palm left Austria and travelled to Venice, first visiting Hungary and Trieste. He arrived in Venice in the November of that year and soon set about sketching the various facets of this beautiful city, the canals and surrounding lagoon and these he took with him and converted into paintings when he went onto Rome at the end of July 1841. He was to remain in the Italian capital for the next ten years.
One of his early paintings during his stay in Rome was View of Ariccia which he completed in 1841 and was a landscape work depicting the town which lies thirty kilometres south-east of the capital. It is now housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Rome at the time was awash with visiting artists. Tourists flowed through the Italian capital and were often on the look out for something to remind them of their visit and so a painting depicting the city sights or the outlying countryside was a must-have thing. There was a German artist colony and there was a Swedish art colony, to just mention a few, and Gustaf Palm soon became acquainted with the artists. He made friends with the Swedish sculptors Johan Niclas Byström and Bengt Fogelberg and became a lifelong friend of the Swedish watercolour painter, Egron Sellif Lundgren.
Gustaf completed many landscape paintings depicting the hills surrounding Rome, views of Tivoli with the catacombs as well as may of the small picturesque towns close to the city.
In December 1851 Gustaf left the Italian capital and moved to Paris and yet he continued to use his sketches from his time in Italy to complete paintings and seemed to dismiss the Parisian surroundings. In October 1852 he left Paris and travelled home to Stockholm. When he returned home he was elected a member of the Royal Academy. From his Swedish base he made a number of painting trips to central Sweden and up to the far north to Norrland. In 1856, Gustaf Palm married Eva Sandberg, the daughter of the painter and professor Johan Gustaf Sandberg and three years later the couple had a daughter, Anna. From 1860 Gustaf taught at the Academy as a professor of elementary drawing, and he held the position until the school was withdrawn at the end of 1878 and transferred to the Technical School.
In 1870 Gustaf completed a beautiful landscape painting of the area close to the hamlet of Bie in central Sweden entitled Vue in the neighbourhood of Bie. The exquisite depiction shows an artist standing in the road sketching the wooden cottage. The old wooden structure has a roof insulated by layers of grass. A man in the foreground struggles with a heavy pail of water which he is going to give to his horse. His unhitched wagon lays by the wayside. Going along the path leading to the house is a woman carrying a heavy bag. Maybe she and the man have been into town for supplies.
Gustaf Wilhelm Palm continued to teach until 1880 and died ten years later on September 20th 1890. He was 80.
my daily art display 