ArtistSwedish
Mosse Stoopendaal
4 active items
Wilhelm Jakob Stoopendaal - known simply as Mosse - was born on February 12, 1901 in Södertälje into a household where art was a daily practice. Both his parents were painters: his father Georg Stoopendaal (1866–1953) worked in the Gothenburg tradition of landscape painting, and his mother Anna Stoopendaal was also active as an artist. Mosse grew up with brushes and canvas as familiar objects, and Georg became his primary teacher. The family moved to Hindås, outside Gothenburg, in 1921, a rural setting that shaped the direction of Mosse's mature work.
From early on, Stoopendaal fixed his attention on the Swedish outdoors - birds on ice floes, hares crossing winter fields, squirrels in birch trees, eiders bobbing on Baltic skerries. He painted almost exclusively outdoors and built an intimate understanding of animal behaviour that reads clearly in the results. His treatment of light in snow scenes, and the way he placed birds against open water or grey winter sky, owes a conscious debt to Bruno Liljefors, the generation-defining wildlife painter whom Stoopendaal openly acknowledged as a guiding inspiration. Liljefors and Stoopendaal shared not only subject matter but a hunter's patience - the willingness to wait, observe, and record movement accurately rather than construct it from imagination.
Storopendaal worked primarily in oil on canvas, though watercolour and ink appear throughout his output. His compositions tend toward economy: one or two animals set against a broadly rendered landscape, with attention given to the quality of winter light or the particular colour of Swedish coastal rock. Recurring subjects include Eurasian bullfinches (domherrar) in snow-covered branches, mallards lifting from half-frozen lakes, oystercatchers on coastal outcrops, and foxes at field margins in low autumn light. He exhibited with the Gothenburg Artist's Club and showed work in both Gothenburg and Stockholm during the 1920s through 1940s. His career was cut short when he died in January 1948 at the age of forty-six.
On the Swedish auction market, Stoopendaal is a steady presence with a well-defined collector base. His 52 recorded lots on Auctionist have appeared at Stockholms Auktionsverk, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and Bukowskis, among others. The strongest results cluster around winter bird paintings - a pair of "Domherrar i vinterlandskap" works have sold for 46,000–75,000 SEK at Bukowskis, while a bullfinch composition recently realised 45,000 EUR at Stockholms Auktionsverk Göteborg. Coastal bird paintings - oystercatchers, eiders, seagulls - consistently attract competitive bidding at 10,000–20,000 SEK. Works from the early 1920s, including squirrel studies signed and dated 1921, also find reliable buyers. The top five sales in the database reach from 11,500 SEK to 45,000 EUR, reflecting the breadth of demand across painting types and formats.