Jules Schyl

Schyl began his formal education in Stockholm, attending the Tekniska skolan from 1913 to 1914 and then completing a drawing-teacher programme at the Högre konstindustriella skolan from 1914 to 1917. Alongside this he studied painting at Althins målarskola. He then crossed back to Copenhagen to study at the Royal Danish Academy under Joakim Skovgaard, Gotfred Rode, and Julius Paulsen from 1917 to 1919. At this stage his painting was still rooted in naturalism, but contact with new currents in Copenhagen drew him toward Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism. Study trips to Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Italy deepened this shift. A brief stay at an etching school in Dresden added printmaking to his range.

In 1921 Schyl took a post as a drawing teacher at Malmö's vocational schools, later moving to the city's technical grammar school, a position that gave him financial stability while he pursued his own work. In the early 1920s he also ran a private painting school in Lund. His civic and artistic commitments in Skåne were substantial: in 1924 he was a founding member of De tolv, a group of painters and sculptors from the region who collectively pushed modernism into the southern Swedish art scene. In 1928 he helped found Konstföreningen Aura, which went on to hold exhibitions at Krognoshuset in Lund for decades.

Schyl's subjects range widely: landscapes in Sweden and abroad, figure studies, portraits, still lifes, and a recurring fascination with the world of music and performance. He painted café scenes in Paris and Berlin, harlequins and mandolin players, dancers caught mid-movement. Italian motifs appear frequently, including paintings of Orvieto and the undulating Tuscan countryside he encountered on his travels. His technique draws on Cubist structure and Expressionist colour, handling surfaces with an energy that keeps his compositions from settling into decoration.

His work in printmaking, covering etching, aquatint, mezzotint, and lithography, runs parallel to his painting and shows the same range of subjects in a more compressed form.

Schyl is represented in the collections of Nationalmuseum, Moderna museet, Malmö Museum, Lund University Art Collections, Helsingborg Museum, and Tomelilla Art Museum, a spread that reflects the sustained attention his work received across Swedish institutions during his lifetime.

At auction, Schyl appears regularly across Swedish houses, with 66 recorded items spanning paintings, works on paper, and prints. His oils command the strongest prices: "Orvieto" sold for 20,000 SEK, a floral still life for 12,000 SEK, and a clown composition in oil for 11,000 SEK. Garpenhus, Bukowskis Malmö, and Bukowskis Stockholm are the venues where his work surfaces most often, reflecting the southern Swedish collector base that has consistently valued his contribution to the region's modernist heritage.