ArtistSwedish
Pär Siegård
1 active items
Pär Sigurd Siegård was born on 28 December 1887 in Helsingborg, where he grew up in a craftsman's milieu that gave him an early grounding in applied decoration. He began formal training in the autumn of 1902 at Helsingborg's technical vocational school, passing his journeyman's examination as a craft and decorative painter in 1907. A year later he enrolled at Valand's painting school in Gothenburg, studying under Carl Wilhelmson, whose emphasis on tonal naturalism formed one pole of Siegård's artistic sensibility.
In 1911 Siegård left Sweden for an extended journey that carried him through Germany, Switzerland, France, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Turkey, and Austria before he settled briefly in Paris in 1913. The encounter with Post-Impressionist and early Expressionist work in the French capital had a lasting effect, loosening his handling and pushing him toward a more direct, emotionally charged line. He returned to Sweden but continued working as a professional decorative painter to sustain himself, only gaining the financial footing to commit fully to fine art in 1920.
That same period he acquired a small cottage at Förslövsholm on the Hallandsåsen ridge, converting it into a studio and permanent home. The landscape of the Bjäre Peninsula — its coastal light, fishing villages, and glacial terrain — became the ground from which his work grew. Alongside the Bjäre painters Christian Berg and Märta Måås-Fjetterström, Siegård participated in an informal artistic exchange that moved from figurative experimentation with cubism and futurism toward increasingly expressive, at times near-abstract, idioms.
Church commissions occupied a significant part of his mature career. His most substantial achievement in this field is the large altar fresco in Grevie kyrka (1937), depicting the Sermon on the Mount set against the landscape of Kullaberg and Skälderviken, with the artist himself and his family woven into the scene. He also executed frescoes in Villands Vånga kyrka. As an easel painter, Siegård worked primarily with flower still lifes in oil, and as a printmaker he developed a forceful approach to woodcut, drawing on biblical themes and handling the medium with an intensity that earned him a place in the Moderna Museet's collection.
His late career brought formal recognition: in 1958 he received Sydsvenska Dagbladet's cultural prize, followed by Helsingborg's cultural stipend in 1959. He died in Ängelholm on 13 March 1961. On the Nordic auction market, his work appears with some regularity at houses concentrated in Skåne and the southwest — Crafoord Auktioner, Garpenhus, and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare have each handled his paintings and prints. Recorded prices have ranged from a few hundred SEK for signed graphic works up to 2,000 SEK for larger figure compositions such as a signed 'Korsnedtagningen,' reflecting a regional rather than national market profile.