ArtistSwedish
Axel Wallert
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Axel Wallert was born on 30 June 1890 in the parish of Sankt Ilian in Västmanland, in the agrarian landscape west of Västerås. He moved to Stockholm as a young man and enrolled at the School of Industrial Design between 1909 and 1912, before continuing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1913. A travel grant from the Board of Trade took him to Germany the following year, an exposure to northern European academic and expressionist currents that preceded a lifetime of restless movement between Sweden and southern Europe.
His first major public commission arrived when he was recruited to work on the interior decoration of the newly completed Stockholm City Hall, the project that occupied Swedish artists and craftsmen through the late 1910s and early 1920s. Wallert painted the coffered ceiling of the colonnade facing Riddarfjärden in blue monochrome - allegorical figures drawn from the old quarter names of Gamla Stan - and produced the relief sculptures set into the niches of the eastern facade, depicting Stockholm tradespeople across eight centuries. He returned to the building between 1935 and 1937 to paint overdoor panels for the City Planning Committee's session room.
In 1923 the Swedish state's large stipend allowed Wallert to move his family to Italy for four years. They lived in Rome, then in Settignano outside Florence, then in Carrara and finally in Positano on the Amalfi Coast. Both his first wife, Sigrid Roos, and later his second wife, Eira Thelander, were painters themselves, and his years in Italy sharpened his palette and deepened his interest in sunlit genre scenes - markets, harbours, figures in outdoor light - alongside the portraits and landscapes he had already established. Works from this period, including the Italian wine-culture painting 'Vino dei Castelli', represent some of his most sought-after output today.
Back in Stockholm he produced portraits of prominent figures, among them Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf - later King Gustaf VI Adolf - alongside murals, altarpieces, prints and drawings. He was a member of Foreningen for Grafisk Konst, the Swedish society for graphic art, and worked across etching, drypoint, aquatint, lithography and woodcut. His draftsmanship is methodical and his colour earthbound, qualities that sit comfortably within the Swedish figurative tradition of the interwar period without being reducible to it.
Work by Axel Wallert is held in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and in DigitaltMuseum. On the Nordic auction market he appears across a spread of Swedish houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and Metropol. In our database his top result is 'Vino dei Castelli' at 9,277 SEK, with other works including street scenes, a female figure with lute, and an Italian harbour selling in the 350-2,200 SEK range. His prints and watercolours trade at the lower end while his Italian oil paintings draw the most consistent interest.