ArtistSwedish
Eric Rhönnstad
1 active items
Born on October 9, 1909, in Silbodals parish in Värmland, Olof Eric Rhönnstad - who adopted his mother's family name in place of the original Andersson - spent virtually his entire life in the Arvika area of western Sweden. His roots in this landscape were deep, and it shaped both the subjects he returned to throughout his career and the intimacy with which he rendered them.
Rhönnstad's formal training was modest by conventional standards. Between the ages of fourteen and fifteen he attended courses in freehand drawing and ceramics under Anna Persson-Hjelm at Arvika's municipal vocational school - an education measured in months rather than years. Yet from that practical foundation he built a working practice that would sustain him for nearly five decades. He made his public debut at the Arvika exhibition in 1933 and continued to exhibit there and in the surrounding region throughout his life.
In his earlier career Rhönnstad gained a reputation as a portrait painter, producing likenesses of local figures in the direct, unadorned manner typical of provincial Swedish painting in the mid-twentieth century. Over time, however, landscape gradually overtook portraiture in his output. From around 1966 onward he devoted himself with increasing focus to winter subjects - snow-covered farmsteads, birch stands in frost, roads through silent pine forests - and it is this body of work that brought him his widest recognition. Some writers referred to him informally as the master of Värmland winter painting.
His technique was rooted in direct observation of the natural world around Arvika. Working primarily in oil on canvas and on panel, he captured the quality of low winter light, the cold blue shadows in snow, and the muted palette of the Scandinavian interior in a way that was both topographically specific and broadly atmospheric. The paintings are signed consistently and often dated, which helps trace the evolution of his approach from the more varied subjects of his early decades to the concentrated winter work of his later period.
Rhönnstad died on March 13, 1980, in Arvika. A memorial exhibition was held at Arvika Nyheters gallery in 1986, and a selection of his works was shown again at Arvika Expo in 1997. He was the father of painter Olle Rhönnstad (1931-1988), making the family an unusual example of two generations of working artists from the same Värmland community.
On the auction market, Rhönnstad's works appear primarily through regional Swedish houses. In the Auctionist database, his 15 recorded items are catalogued exclusively as paintings, with Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk accounting for nine appearances. Prices have been modest, with top realized sales in the 600-750 SEK range, reflecting his status as a regional painter with a loyal local following rather than a presence in the national secondary market.