Lars Holmström

Holmström was one of the founding craftsmen behind Arvika Konsthantverk, the cooperative workshop that shaped the town's identity as a centre of applied arts in the early twentieth century. He even forged the collective's iron and brass shop sign. His output ranged from candlesticks and chandeliers to domestic trays, wall sconces, and sacred vessels — all worked by hand in brass, silver, and wrought iron.

The Swedish Grace movement, which blended classical restraint with craft sensibility in the 1920s and 1930s, found a natural exponent in Holmström. His forms carry the same measured elegance: spare geometric silhouettes, considered proportions, and a surface quality that speaks of hand-finishing rather than industrial production. The Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in 1925 gave him international exposure; his candlesticks and chandeliers drew notice in French art periodicals, whose critics described the work in terms otherwise reserved for the fine arts.

The scale of his ecclesiastical commissions is striking. Holmström supplied liturgical metalwork — altar crosses, baptismal fonts, communion vessels, chandeliers — to more than 57 churches across Värmland alone, and to churches in Gothenburg, Kalmar, Stockholm, and Uppsala. Among the most visible of these works is the brass baptismal font donated to Långseruds church in the 1940s, and the chandeliers he executed together with C-G Ericsson for Arvika's Trefaldighetskyrkan.

Holmström worked continuously from his Arvika workshop until his death on 14 February 1959 in Båstad. On the Nordic auction market, his pieces appear most often at Bukowskis, Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk, Metropol, and Stockholms Auktionsverk, with wall sconces and candlestick pairs being the most common lots. Prices at Auctionist range from roughly 1,200 SEK for single candlesticks to just over 10,000 SEK for period wall-sconce pairs, with Swedish Grace and Swedish Modern pieces from the 1930s and 1940s typically attracting the strongest results.