ArtistSwedish
Bror-Eric Bergqvist
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Bror-Eric Bergqvist was born on 6 April 1944 in Delsbo, a village in the Hälsingland region of central Sweden, and spent virtually his entire life tied to that landscape. He showed a clear talent for drawing from an early age, and his parents considered sending him to Konstfack, the Stockholm school of arts and crafts, but the family's finances made that impossible. Instead, a local artist in Delsbo gave him basic instruction, planting the roots of a practice that would eventually make him one of the most recognisable regional voices in Swedish painting.
After finishing school he worked as a decorator at the Domus department store in Ljusdal, then moved to Skara in 1962 to continue in the same trade. It was in Skara that he began to paint seriously and exhibit his work. The early canvases leaned heavily on nude studies, which prompted local newspapers to dub him 'the porn painter from Skara' - a label he wore with some amusement. An exhibition in those years drew larger crowds than a Picasso show held the same season in the same city, and the commercial response convinced him that painting could be a livelihood.
In the late 1960s he returned to Hälsingland for good. By 1970 he had converted the old church school - Kyrkskolan - in Bjuråker into a studio and exhibition space, and from that point he worked full time as an artist. He worked in oil, watercolour, acrylic, and pastel, and his subject matter crystallised around what he called 'Hälsingland in Saga and Reality.' This meant the region's forests and waterways filtered through the lens of Swedish folk belief: the water spirit Näcken playing fiddle on a moonlit lake, huldror drifting through birch stands, and trolls glimpsed at the edge of clearings. These mythological figures were not decorative additions but the emotional centre of his paintings, giving the Hälsingland landscape a charged, unsettled quality.
His portraits of well-known Hälsingland personalities, including the singer Lill Babs, brought him wider recognition beyond the region. He is represented in the permanent collection of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, a formal acknowledgement of work that might otherwise be classed as purely local or folk art. He continued to paint and exhibit from Bjuråker until his death on 29 August 2013.
At auction, Bergqvist's works appear mostly through houses in and around Hälsingland, with Hälsinglands Auktionsverk and Handelslagret Auktionsservice each handling roughly equal shares of his market. Stockholms Auktionsverk has also offered his paintings. His top recorded result on Auctionist is 8,000 SEK for an oil on canvas dated 1999, with other oils selling in the 2,000-5,000 SEK range. Pastels, including nude studies from the early 1970s, typically fetch between 1,000-1,100 SEK. The market is modest in scale but consistent, reflecting a steady regional collecting base rather than a speculative one.