ArtistSwedish
Per Hasselberg
1 active items
Per Hasselberg was born on 1 January 1850 in Hasselstad, a village near Ronneby in the province of Blekinge, as Karl Petter Åkesson, the sixth child of a smallholder family. He changed his surname to Hasselberg around 1870, taking the name of his birthplace. Financial necessity cut his formal schooling short at twelve, and he was apprenticed as a carpenter in Karlshamn, where contact with ornamental stonecutters planted the first seeds of a sculptural vocation.
Hasselberg moved to Stockholm in 1869 and spent the following years working as an ornamental sculptor while attending evening and weekend classes at the city's craft school. A government scholarship in 1876 made the decisive break possible: he traveled to Paris and was accepted into the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts the following year. Paris in the late 1870s and 1880s was the centre of gravity for European sculpture, and Hasselberg absorbed its currents without surrendering to academic convention. His studio became a place of slow, painstaking work in marble, a material he handled with uncommon tenderness.
His first major international recognition came at the 1881 Salon, where Snöklockan (La Perce-Neige) received an honorable mention - the only Swedish work to be so distinguished that year. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm commissioned a marble version, completed in 1883 and awarded a gold medal at that year's Salon. Grodan (La Grenouille) followed for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a quietly arresting image of a girl with a frog between her knees. Näckrosen (The Water Lily), completed in the early 1890s, was shown at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Alongside these figure works he produced portrait sculptures, including a bronze of the painter Ernst Josephson, copies of which are held at Nationalmuseum, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, and the Thiel Gallery.
What distinguishes Hasselberg's sculptures is a quality of interiority. His nudes are not heroic or theatrical; they fold inward, caught in moments of absorption or reverie. The surfaces he carved in Parian and marble have a skin-like warmth that separates them from the smooth idealism prevalent among his contemporaries. This quality made his work widely reproduced in cheaper materials - gips and Parian copies spread across Swedish bourgeois interiors - while the originals remained rare and sought after.
Hasselberg died in Stockholm on 25 July 1894, aged forty-four, before he could fully develop a body of monumental work. The brevity of his career gives his output a concentrated quality: a small number of compositions, each iterated across materials and scales, each still widely recognised in Sweden today. His work is held at the Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet, the Furstenberg Gallery in Gothenburg, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
On the Nordic auction market his legacy circulates primarily through posthumous casts and reproductions rather than original marbles. The sixteen items recorded on Auctionist's platform have appeared at Swedish regional houses including Örebro Stadsauktioner, Norrlands Auktionsverk, and Uppsala Auktionskammare, with the majority catalogued as sculptures. Realized prices for Parian and gips casts sit in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand SEK, while original marbles at Bukowskis have achieved hammer prices between 65,000 and 155,000 SEK, reflecting the enduring appetite for his most personal motifs: Grodan and Snöklockan above all.