ArtistSE
Einar Forseth
3 active items
Carl Einar Andreas Forseth was born in Linköping in 1892, the son of a Norwegian lithographer who moved the family first to Örebro and then to Gothenburg. In Gothenburg he studied at the Arts and Crafts School under Gunnar Hallström and Charles Lindholm before completing his formal education at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm between 1912 and 1915, where Oscar Björck and Olle Hjortzberg shaped his understanding of figure painting and decorative composition. What followed was a period of travel, particularly to Istanbul, Greece, and Italy, where he encountered the Byzantine mosaic tradition that would define the most consequential commission of his career.
That commission arrived in 1921, when Forseth was engaged to create the mosaics for the Golden Hall - Gyllene salen - of Stockholm's City Hall, then under construction to a design by Ragnar Östberg. The hall, completed in 1923, is covered floor to gallery with more than 18 million pieces of glass and gold, assembled by the Berlin firm Puhl & Wagner from Forseth's designs. The iconographic program is organized around Mälardrottningen, the Queen of Lake Mälaren, who presides at the eastern wall as an allegorical figure connecting Stockholm to its waterways. Around her, scenes from Swedish history and mythology unfold in a vocabulary borrowed from Ravenna and Constantinople but inflected with an Art Nouveau lyricism that places the work firmly in its own moment. The Golden Hall is now the setting for the Nobel Prize banquet, and Forseth's mosaics constitute one of the most visited public interiors in Scandinavia.
The Golden Hall was not Forseth's only contribution to the built environment. He produced stained glass for churches across Sweden, including St Mary's Church in Helsingborg (1937) and Sankt Nicolai in Halmstad (1937), as well as works at St Peter and St Sigfrid's Church in Stockholm. His reach extended internationally when he created the Swedish Windows at Coventry Cathedral in 1961, five lancets in the Lady Chapel given as a gift from the Swedish people and, in part, from Forseth himself. The windows depict the arrival of Christian missionaries in Scandinavia through a Modernist figurative language that departs noticeably from his earlier Byzantine formalism. He also designed floor mosaics for Coventry's Chapel of Unity. Separately, he contributed decorative designs to the Lidköping porcelain factory, demonstrating a range that moved comfortably between the monumental and the domestic.
Forseth lived to 96, and his output across oil painting, watercolor, drawing, tapestry, and monumental mosaic spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. On the Auctionist platform, 40 items attributed to Forseth are recorded across Swedish auction houses, with paintings accounting for the majority of lots. His work appears most frequently at Stockholms Auktionsverk, Bukowskis, and Crafoord Auktioner. Top auction results include a church window study for Mariakyrkan in Helsingborg that achieved 9,000 SEK, and an oil on panel that reached 4,500 SEK. Three active listings are currently available on the platform.