ArtistSwedish
Lennart Sand
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Growing up near the forests and lakes of Jämtland in northern Sweden, Lennart Sand developed an obsession with animals and landscape from early childhood. He visited painters he admired, including Lindorm Liljefors, and formed close ties with the wildlife painting community around him - absorbing a tradition in Swedish animal art that reaches back through Bruno Liljefors to the 19th century naturalist painters. Sand worked for years as a magazine illustrator covering hunting and fishing, a writer of nature columns for the daily press, and took on other jobs to sustain himself, before his paintings alone began to provide an income. He became a full-time artist in 1978 at the age of 31.
Sand works primarily in oil on canvas and panel, and his subjects are the mammals and birds of the Nordic landscape: bears, foxes, raptors, owls, and waders in winter forests and marsh environments. His approach treats the animal not as specimen but as participant in a broader scene, where weather, light, and habitat carry equal weight. A recurring winter palette - grey skies, bare birch, iron-cold water - ties his compositions to a distinctly northern sensibility. He has also produced colour lithographs in numbered editions, extending his reach beyond the original painting market.
Sand has authored ten books combining text and illustrations, published in Sweden between 1987 and 2016, and created bronze sculptures and public installations of birds and mammals across Sweden from 1986 onwards. His solo and group exhibitions have taken him across Europe and to the United States, and his work has entered the permanent collections of three major wildlife art institutions: the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, the Museum of Nature in Art in Gloucester, England, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Wyoming. These acquisitions, made across the 1980s through the 2000s, reflect sustained international recognition within the specialist wildlife art field.
On the Swedish auction market, Sand's work appears regularly at houses including Bukowskis Stockholm, Falun Auktionsbyrå, TOKA Auktionshus, and Gomér and Andersson. His 31 auction records on Auctionist span oil paintings, panels, and lithographs, with subjects including leopard, bear, fox in winter landscape, a Bohemian waxwing, and a pygmy owl. The top auction result in our database is 28,008 SEK for a work titled "Leopard," with other oil paintings typically trading in the range of 1,500 to 5,000 SEK. Four works are currently active at auction.