ArtistEstonian
Erik Haamer
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Eerik Haamer was born on February 17, 1908 in Kuressaare, on the island of Saaremaa (then called Arensburg on Oesel) in what is today Estonia. The island setting left a permanent imprint on his imagination - the sea, the shore, and the people who live alongside them became the recurring subjects of a long and productive career. He entered the Pallas Higher Art School in Tartu in 1930, studying there for five years under the painter Nikolai Triig, one of the central figures of interwar Estonian art. He also made educational trips to Finland, France, and Norway before graduating in 1935.
After a period as a sports and art teacher at a Tartu school for boys, Haamer gained traction in Estonian art circles during the late 1930s and early 1940s with paintings of dark palette and serious intent - coastal farming life on Saaremaa and Runö, figure compositions in which human beings appear as both part of and at the mercy of natural forces. In the summer of 1942 he spent time at sea with eel fishermen from Muhu Island, gathering material that fed his most characteristic work. From 1941 to 1944 he taught at the Tallinn Applied Art School. Then, in the autumn of 1944, as Soviet forces reoccupied Estonia, he left on a boat and did not return for decades.
Haamer settled in Gothenburg in 1945, joining the substantial Estonian exile community that took root in Sweden after the war. Until 1954 he worked in the archives of the Gothenburg Ethnographic Museum, and from there moved to draughting work at the architect firm of Einar Eriksson until 1955, when he became a freelance artist. Sweden's West Coast - Bohuslän, Tjörn, Skärhamn, the offshore skerries - provided new coastal material that absorbed the same formal concerns he had brought from the Baltic. He worked in oil, watercolor, and charcoal, and from the late 1950s onward produced a substantial body of lithographs, including the well-known 'Vasaloppet' series (edition of 300) depicting the mass cross-country skiing race, and the 'Tjörn runt' regatta lithograph. Between 1952 and 1953 he created 25 illustrations for the Estonian national epic 'Kalevipoeg,' 20 of which appeared in the exile edition published in Toronto in 1954.
His reputation in Sweden developed steadily, and he is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Örebro Läns Museum. His career also extended internationally through Estonian exile exhibitions shown in Poland, Hungary, Italy, Canada, and the United States. In 2008, the Estonian Art Museum (Kumu) mounted a major retrospective titled 'On Both Sides of the Sea,' bringing key works from Sweden back to Estonia and establishing Haamer's standing within the longer arc of Estonian art history. He died in Sweden on November 4, 1994. His son Joel Haamer has authenticated works from his estate, and items intygad av Joel Haamer appear regularly at Swedish auction.
On the Auctionist platform, Haamer is represented by 13 works, all of them now closed. Sales have been handled primarily by Stockholms Auktionsverk (Magasin 5 and the Gothenburg branch), along with Göteborgs Auktionsverk and Auktionshuset Kolonn. The top recorded result in our database is 22,009 SEK for 'Tistel' (sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk Göteborg in March 2026), followed by 16,514 SEK for 'Kaluriküla Läänerannikul (Skärhamn),' an oil depicting a West Coast fishing village under its Estonian title. Lithographs such as 'Tjörn runt' (edition 88/200, 5,632 SEK) and 'Vasaloppet' editions trade in the 3,000-4,000 SEK range, while self-portraits in oil have reached 2,000-2,549 SEK. The breadth of media and subjects at auction reflects the full range of his Swedish period.