ArtistEstonian
Boris Ninemae
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Boris Ninemäe (also spelled Niinemäe) was born in Estonia in 1925. His early artistic training began in Estonia but was cut short by the upheavals of the Second World War and the Soviet occupation, which prompted him, like many Estonian intellectuals and artists of his generation, to emigrate westward. He eventually settled in Sweden, where he built his career over several decades, exhibiting in Malmö, Växjö, Karlshamn, and Stockholm, as well as in Norwegian cities including Larvik and Elverum. His works entered a number of foreign museum collections.
Despite the rupture of emigration, Ninemäe's imagination remained firmly rooted in Estonian life. He returned repeatedly - in paint if not always in person - to the landscapes, labor, and faces of his homeland. His canvases document a rural world: hay harvests in summer fields, women bending over vegetable carts, fishermen sorting nets, blacksmiths at the forge, loggers taking a break from the forest, families gathered around a fireplace on winter evenings. The subjects are almost exclusively human, almost always at work or in the brief pauses between tasks. There is no idealization of poverty in this - Ninemäe's peasant scenes are observational rather than sentimental, and the light in his oils tends to come from practical sources: hearth fire, afternoon sun, the pale luminosity of a Baltic winter sky.
His technique was grounded in realism, drawing on a northern European figurative tradition that had shaped Estonian art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the Soviet period redirected official culture toward Socialist Realism. For Ninemäe, working in Swedish exile, that figurative tradition could be pursued on its own terms, without political obligation in either direction. The result is a body of work that reads as documentary as much as painterly - a record of an Estonia that was changing rapidly, or in some cases disappearing entirely, during the decades he was painting it.
Ninemäe continued his artistic education through study trips to Finland, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Germany, Italy, France, and the United States, indicating both a sustained engagement with European painting traditions and the kind of restless curiosity that characterizes artists working outside institutional frameworks. He died in 1991, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing and Estonia was on the verge of regaining its independence.
At Auctionist, Boris Ninemäe appears exclusively as a painter, with all 40 recorded items listed as oil paintings. His work circulates primarily through southern Swedish auction houses: Crafoord Auktioner in Malmö accounts for 12 lots, followed by Garpenhus Auktioner with 8 and Markus Auktioner with 4. The top recorded price is 16,509 SEK for "Höbärgning" (Haymaking), followed by 9,759 SEK for "Bondkvinna med grönsakskärra" (Peasant woman with vegetable cart) and 7,438 SEK for "Bönder och jägare" (Farmers and hunters). These results place him firmly in the mid-market for Nordic figurative painting from the emigre tradition - a painter valued for his subjects as much as his hand.