ArtistSwedish
Åke Nothberg
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Åke Nothberg was born in Stockholm on July 18, 1891, the son of marine inspector Richard Nothberg and his wife Dika, née Sjöström. He would spend most of his life in the city of his birth, and Stockholm's waterfronts, quays, and rooftops would form the backbone of his output across more than four decades of active painting.
Nothberg's earliest dated works place him at work in the 1910s, and a trip to Italy in 1920 broadened his range. Southern European landscape and light enriched a practice that was already rooted in close observation of place. Back in Stockholm he developed a preference for the working parts of the city: shipyards, harbour approaches, the views from Katarinahissen over Södermalm's roofscapes, the old yards at Djurgårdsvarvet. His 1921 oil of Djurgårdsvarvet, signed and dated, is among the earliest precisely documented works and already shows the compact, direct handling that characterizes his mature style. Commissions and interest in portraiture ran alongside the cityscape work; a pencil drawing of his fellow artist Siri Derkert survives as one of the more personally charged pieces in the known record.
In April 1926 Nothberg participated in the group exhibition "10 Svenska Akvarellister" at Göteborgs Konsthall, held between April 6 and 28, alongside artists including Ossian Elgström, Robert Högfeldt, and Louis Sparre. The inclusion signals his standing among Stockholm's working painters during the interwar period. He continued to date his canvases consistently through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s, and the surviving works show a broad range: harbour panoramas such as the 1935 view of Göteborgshamn, figure and nude studies in charcoal and pencil, religious subjects such as the 1932 oil "Tre vise män" (Three Wise Men), and mixed-media landscapes with architectural ruins.
Nothberg worked across media with considerable fluency. Oils on panel and canvas, watercolours, charcoal, pencil, and mixed technique all appear in his known production, and the consistency of his signature - Å. Nothberg or Å Nothberg - across all of them makes attribution straightforward. His style sits in the broadly realistic-impressionist tradition of Swedish early-twentieth-century painting, attentive to atmospheric light and to the specific character of places rather than to programmatic formal experiment. He died in 1973 in Stockholm, and is listed in the 1962 edition of the biographical register Vem är vem? for Greater Stockholm.
On the Nordic auction market, Nothberg appears most regularly at Metropol in Stockholm and at smaller houses in the south and west of Sweden. On Auctionist, 13 works are recorded across Metropol, Gomér and Andersson in Nyköping, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and others. The highest result in the database is a pencil portrait of Siri Derkert that reached 1,359 SEK. Subjects span Stockholm harbour views, oil landscapes dated to the 1910s through 1940s, charcoal drawings, and figure studies. Price levels remain modest, reflecting the wider market for diligent but regionally focused Swedish painters of the period.