ArtistSwedish
Bror Jonson
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Bror Adolf Jonson was born on July 17, 1923 in Nordmaling parish in Västerbotten, the son of farmer Adolf Jonsson and Helena Landfors. He grew up in the Norrland countryside and spent his entire life closely tied to the landscape and communities of the Nordmaling area, including the village of Långed, which appears repeatedly in his titles.
His formal training began after the war. In 1949 he studied at Skånska målarskolan in southern Sweden, and the following year attended Otte Sköld's painting school in Stockholm. Otte Sköld was one of the central figures in Swedish post-war arts education, and his school drew students from across the country who went on to paint in widely varying directions. Jonson supplemented this institutional training with self-directed study during travels to France, Spain, and Italy, where exposure to different light conditions and painting traditions left a mark on his handling of color and atmosphere.
His output focused on oil painting, covering three main areas: landscape, still life, and figurative work. The northern Swedish landscape, with its forests, marshes, and shorelines, formed a persistent subject. Titles like 'Landskap med skog o myr, Långed', 'Norrbyskären', and 'Norrlandsby' suggest a painter who returned again and again to specific places he knew from direct experience rather than seeking out pictorial novelty. Stil lifes with objects from everyday surroundings, including a notable series with violins, and figurative compositions including market scenes round out his production.
Jonson participated in group and traveling exhibitions organized by the Västerbotten County Art Association and from 1953 also showed with the Karlskrona Art Association in southern Sweden. A retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at Västerbottens Museum in 1956, relatively early in his career, indicating that he had by then established a body of work significant enough for institutional recognition in his home region. Works by Jonson are held in the collections of Västerbottens Museum, which has documented his Långed archive extensively.
He continued painting into the 2000s - several dated works from the early 2000s appear at auction - and he died on February 5, 2005, in Nordmaling, the community where he was born. His work is sold primarily through Norrland auction houses, particularly Norrlands Auktionsverk, and his pictures achieve modest prices consistent with a regional painter of solid craft who worked outside the major art centres of Stockholm and Gothenburg.