ArtistSwedish
Evert Taube
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Axel Evert Taube was born on 12 March 1890 in Gothenburg, at his grandfather's house overlooking the river at Otterhällan. He grew up on the island of Vinga outside Gothenburg, where his father served as lighthouse keeper - an upbringing by the sea that would shape the maritime imagery running through both his music and his visual art for the rest of his life.
Taube studied at the Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg, and continued his artistic education through travels abroad, most notably in Paris and along the Mediterranean coast. Rather than formal schooling, he sought out working artists directly, learning through observation and practice. This self-directed approach gave his visual work a personal, lyrical quality distinct from academic painting traditions of the era.
As a visual artist, Taube worked primarily in watercolor, gouache and pencil, with oil painting and lithography appearing later in his career. From the 1970s he produced signed and numbered lithographic editions that have become among the most accessible and collected of his visual works. His subjects were those he loved best: Swedish archipelago landscapes, Mediterranean port scenes, portraits and figures drawn from his wandering years in South America and southern Europe. The drawings he made during those early travels have a swift, observational quality, recording light and place with economy.
His art attracted institutional recognition during his own lifetime. As early as 1927, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm acquired drawings from his hand. After his death in 1976, a further 178 works entered the collection of Moderna Museet, confirming the seriousness with which Swedish cultural institutions regard his visual output alongside the better-known songs. His wife, Astri Bergman Taube, was herself a painter and sculptor, and the couple's household was one where the visual arts and music were treated as inseparable.
At Nordic auction houses, Taube's works appear regularly across a range of formats. Our database records 30 items attributed to him, spanning signed lithographs, serigraphs, books, and printed matter. The top result in our records is a signed and numbered colour lithograph (121/340) sold for 1,851 SEK, while a portfolio of serigraphs titled "Minnen från Pampas" reached 1,000 EUR. Works have appeared at Crafoord Auktioner Stockholm, Auktionshuset Thelin and Johansson, Formstad Auktioner, and Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla, among others. Broader auction market records show works selling up to 36,000 SEK at Bukowskis Stockholm.