ArtistSwedish
Tage Nilsson
2 active items
Tage Evald Nilsson was born on May 8, 1918 in Limhamn, and he would live there until his death on December 14, 2016 - a life of nearly a century spent between that small Scanian harbour town and the limestone plains of Öland. His extraordinarily long career, spanning the mid-1940s to the early 2000s, produced a body of work rooted in the Swedish landscape tradition but inflected by the light and colour of France and Spain.
Nilsson came to painting later than many of his contemporaries. He enrolled at Skånska målarskolan in 1941-42, then studied at Essemskolan in Malmö from 1946 to 1949. In 1950, he sharpened his technical foundation at Otte Sköld's painting school in Stockholm, a formative year that coincided with his participation in Nationalmuseum's exhibition "Unga Tecknare" (Young Draughtsmen) in both 1950 and 1951. Study trips to France and Spain followed, and the quality of Mediterranean light - the sharp shadows of Ibiza streets, the warm tones of the Provençal countryside - would become a recurring counterpoint to his Nordic subjects.
Around 1950, Nilsson and his wife Inga acquired a house in Runsten parish on the eastern coast of Öland, and he spent roughly half of each year there for the rest of his active life. The island gave him some of his most sustained subject matter: the limestone farmsteads, the coastal light at Hovs Hallar in Skåne, the fishing village of Fiskebäckskil on the Bohuslän coast, and the rocky Baltic outpost of Christiansö north of Bornholm. He worked in oil, watercolour, and pastel, consistently pursuing what he described as the possibilities of light and colour. His handling of contre-jour effects, subjects seen against bright sky or water, gives many canvases a luminous, near-impressionist quality.
He exhibited widely across southern Sweden and Stockholm. Solo shows at SDS-hallen in Malmö in 1951, at Sturegalleriet in 1957, and in Kungsbacka in 1959 were complemented by regular participation in the group exhibitions of Skånes Konstförening, Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening, the Arildsgruppen, and the Stockholm salons at Liljevalchs konsthall. He is represented in the permanent collections of Trelleborgs Museum and Kalmar konstmuseum. Together with his wife, Nilsson endowed a scholarship administered by Limhamns Konstförening - 20,000 SEK awarded to artists who take Öland as their subject - a late-life act of generosity toward the landscape that shaped him.
On the Nordic auction market, Nilsson's oils have circulated mainly through smaller Swedish houses. On Auctionist, 13 works have appeared across houses including Garpenhus Auktioner, Markus Auktioner, and Skånes Auktionsverk, with subjects ranging from Öland farmsteads and Ibiza street scenes to Paris street motifs and garden interiors. Top recorded sales include a street scene from Ibiza reaching 6,091 SEK and a garden painting at 1,600 SEK. His work trades at accessible price points, attracting buyers drawn to the Swedish landscape tradition and to evocative travel motifs from an earlier era of plein-air painting.