ArtistSwedish
Maja Fjaestad
2 active items
Maja Fjaestad (1873-1961) was born in Hörby in Skåne, the daughter of a clergyman. She received her first drawing instruction in Landskrona, then studied at the Tekniska Elementarskolan in Malmö before training privately with several artists. When the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts rejected her application, she enrolled instead at the Konstnärsförbundet school in Stockholm (1893-1895), studying under Richard Bergh, Carl Larsson, and Anders Zorn, three figures who shaped Swedish fin-de-siècle painting. She became a member of the Konstnärsförbundet in 1895.
Through those circles she met the painter Gustaf Fjaestad. They married in 1898 and built a home at Kampudden, beside Lake Racken outside Arvika in Värmland, where a loose gathering of artists had formed what became known as the Rackstad Colony. The colony brought together painters, textile artists, and craftspeople united by a belief in the integration of art and daily life, a Gesamtkunstwerk ideal that Maja and Gustaf both embodied in different disciplines.
In 1901, Maja founded a weaving workshop at Kampudden. Her textiles used an old Swedish technique called upphämta and featured geometric vegetation, animal motifs, and silhouetted figures drawn from folklore. The workshop became a genuine enterprise, producing work that was sold and exhibited widely. In 1922, she was among the twelve artists who co-founded Arvika Konsthantverk, a crafts association she chaired until 1948.
From around 1910, she began working with color woodcuts. Over four decades she produced more than 170 distinct motifs, nearly all printed on Japanese washi paper and focused on flowering branches, spring blossoms, tulips, and other intimate plant subjects. The technique drew on both Nordic folk art and the Japonism that had circulated through Swedish modernist circles since the 1890s, a synthesis that gave her prints a delicate flatness, clear outlines, and layered color that was very much her own. They were widely exhibited across Sweden, England, and the United States through the 1920s and 1930s.
Her portraits in oil also attracted serious attention. The portrait of organist Otto Nordlund, shown through Karlstad Hammarö auctions, represents the more painterly dimension of her practice alongside the better-known graphic work. Works by Maja Fjaestad entered the collections of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a level of international institutional recognition unusual for Swedish women artists of her generation.
She received the Royal Patriotic Society's gold medal in 1947 and remained artistically active until late in life. She died in Arvika on 15 November 1961.
At auction, Maja Fjaestad appears most actively through houses in the Swedish west and midlands, particularly Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsbyrå and SAV Magasin 5, which together account for the majority of her Swedish secondary market. The portrait of organist Otto Nordlund achieved 86,000 SEK, the highest result in the available dataset, while signed color woodcuts typically sell in the range of 4,000-7,500 SEK. With 81 items recorded across Nordic auction rooms and three currently active, her market is consistent rather than volatile, prints with clear signatures and good impression quality continue to find buyers reliably.