ArtistSwedish
Signe Sohlman
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Signe Sohlman was born in Stockholm in 1854, the second child in a large family headed by Per August Ferdinand Sohlman, chief editor of Aftonbladet and a prominent figure in Swedish cultural life. The home environment shaped an early love for art and literature, and her talent emerged quickly enough that she began studies at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1872, when she was just seventeen. Among her fellow students were Carl Larsson and Ernst Josephson, two painters who would go on to define Swedish visual culture in the late 19th century. Under Professor Johan August Malmström - himself a major figure in national romantic and fairy-tale illustration - Sohlman developed into one of the studio's favoured students and eventually a collaborator, jointly illustrating an edition of Zacharias Topelius' Läsning för barn, first published in 1877.
Alongside her academic painting and illustration work, Sohlman turned her attention to textile design in a manner that proved to be her most enduring contribution. Drawing on the then-fashionable interest in Old Norse ornament and Viking Age imagery, she created a dragon-pattern design characterised by interlaced forms and mirror symmetry. The Almedahls weaving mill, based in Gothenburg, adopted the design for production as a fine linen damask cloth - sold under the name Drakduken, or the Dragon Cloth. In 1877, the design won first prize at the first international design exhibition in Amsterdam, an extraordinary achievement for a young artist in her early twenties.
Her studies at the Academy were interrupted in 1875 when she was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. She spent subsequent years convalescing, but the illness allowed no sustained recovery. Sohlman died in 1878, aged only 23. Her life in art lasted barely six years from formal training to death, yet the body of work she left behind includes academic paintings, illustrations for one of Scandinavia's most widely read children's books, and a textile design that Almedahls continued to manufacture from 1877 until 1989 - over a century after her death. A drawing by Sohlman is held in the collection of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.
In 1876, Sohlman also joined a group of women travelling independently through the Norwegian mountains - a journey later recognised as an early act of women's emancipation in Scandinavia. On the Swedish auction market today, Sohlman's name is almost entirely associated with the Drakduken textile in its various forms: tablecloths, napkins, and sets in linen damask, produced by Almedahls across many decades. Our database holds 29 auction records with 6 currently active, appearing at Göteborgs Auktionsverk, Formstad Auktioner, Crafoord Auktioner, and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare. The top recorded sale is 4,952 SEK for a set of tablecloths and napkins, with most pieces trading between 1,800 and 2,800 SEK.