ArtistSE
Erik Tryggelin
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Paris in 1911 was the centre of everything new in art. Erik Viktor Tryggelin arrived at the Académie Colarossi in October that year - the same studio where Gauguin and Modigliani had worked - and spent a year and a half absorbing the city. He visited Gertrude Stein's apartment and saw her collection of Picasso and Matisse. He met fellow Swedish painters Karl Isakson and John Sten. He understood perfectly well what was happening around him. Then he went home to Stockholm and spent the next fifty years painting the city he had always known.
Born in Stockholm on 25 June 1878, Tryggelin had trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts (Konstakademien) before the Paris years. His formation belonged to an older order - the careful observation of place, the social scene, the particular atmosphere of northern light in evening or under cloudy skies. What Paris gave him was not conversion to modernism but confirmation that his own path was a deliberate one. A critic later called him 'the forgotten idyllic painter,' a label that captures both the underappreciation and the quality of attentiveness his work requires.
The great subjects of his career are three cities. Stockholm provided its bridges, its quays, its traffic and daily life - the stretch of Norrbro with the Royal Palace behind it was painted repeatedly and across decades. Visby on Gotland offered medieval walls and the light of the Baltic. Vadstena, the small medieval city on Lake Vättern, drew him back through its town hall, its convent ruins, and the changing weather over the water. He was also a skilled photographer, and large parts of his estate - including photographic documentation of Stockholm streetlife around 1900-1905 - were acquired by Nordiska museet in 1963. Stockholm City Museum holds further photographic material.
Tryggelin worked in both oil and watercolour, and his handling of atmosphere - the bluish dusk over Stockholm water, the grey light before rain over Vadstena - is what distinguishes him from more documentary-minded urban recorders of his generation. He was less interested in architecture as architecture than in the city as a scene of human presence, however small the figures. He remained committed to figuration and the observed world throughout his life, dying in Stockholm on 9 August 1962 at the age of 84. The National Museum of Sweden holds more than 60 works by him.
On Auctionist, Tryggelin appears in 20 lots across the auction market, primarily at Bukowskis Stockholm, Roslagens Auktionsverk, and Crafoord Auktioner. The top result in the database is a Stockholm - Norrbro composition that reached 84,000 SEK at Bukowskis, a significant distance above the next result of 18,108 SEK for a Stockholm Slott painting. Vadstena and other motifs range between 4,000-7,500 SEK, establishing a clear price hierarchy with his Stockholm cityscapes at the top.