ArtistSwedish
Martin Säflund
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Lars Martin Säflund was born on 20 August 1894 in Uppsala, a city that would define both the subject matter and the institutional orbit of his entire working life. He took up painting as a self-taught amateur in 1918 while simultaneously studying at the Tekniska skolan in Uppsala, approaching art not through a conventional academic pathway but through a steady accumulation of observational practice in the city and plains around him.
His public debut came in 1925, when he exhibited church interiors and oil landscapes - a body of work that announced a quiet, attentive eye for architectural space and the particular quality of light in central Sweden. The following year he traveled to Italy, enrolling at the English Academy in Rome from 1926 to 1927, and returning in 1929 to study under Sigmund Lipinsky, the German-born etcher and draughtsman who spent much of his career in Rome. The Italian sojourn opened Säflund to the pictorial possibilities of the Mediterranean south: the rolling hillsides around Assisi, the ordered clarity of Roman cultural landscapes, and the ochre-washed facades of small towns in Umbria.
It was around this period that watercolor became his primary medium and remained so for the rest of his life. The technique suited his approach to landscape - direct, portable, and capable of capturing atmosphere and light without laboring toward completeness. He returned to Italy repeatedly across subsequent decades, continuing to find subjects in Assisi and the Roman countryside, and he also spent a period in the Netherlands in the 1950s, where the low-lying terrain and silvery light offered a northern counterpart to his Italian motifs.
At home in Uppsala, his attention settled on the Fyrisån river corridor and the rolling terrain of Upplandsslätten - the flat, wide farmland that stretches north of the city. He participated in Upplands konstförenings exhibitions in Uppsala roughly ten times over the course of his career, and his works entered the collections of Gävle Museum, the Upplands konstförening holdings, and San Francesco Church in Assisi. He drew and painted the cathedral, the Gustavianum, street corners along the old town, and the seasonal moods of the plains.
On the Swedish secondary market, Säflund appears across regional auction houses in Uppsala and central Sweden. Auctionist shows his work at Uppsala Auktionskammare, Auktionshuset Kolonn, Auktionshuset Thelin and Johansson, and Upplandsauktionsverk, among others. Titles in the current and recent sale record - 'Fyrisån med vy över Uppsala', 'Motiv från Upplandsslätten', 'Uppsalamotiv' - confirm the consistency of his geographic preoccupations. Prices at auction are modest, typically in the hundreds of Swedish kronor for watercolors and small oil panels, reflecting his status as a regional landscape painter beloved in Uppsala rather than a nationally traded name. He died on 13 June 1976 in Uppsala.