Berta Hansson

Born on June 23, 1910, in Hammerdal in Jämtland, Hansson grew up in a farming family where her early talent for drawing was recognized and encouraged. After the deaths of her mother and elder sister, she completed high school in Sigtuna - studying art, literature, and philosophy - before earning her teaching diploma in Umeå in 1934. She spent the next decade as a schoolteacher in Fredrika, a village in the far north of Sweden, where she began sketching her pupils in class and at play. Watercolors and oils followed.

In 1938, while on a teaching trip to Linköping, she met the painter Leoo Verde, who encouraged her to commit more seriously to painting. Two years later she studied under Brita Nordencreutz and attended a summer course at Otte Sköld's painting school in Stockholm. The writer and artist Elsa Björkman-Goldschmidt, impressed by what she saw, arranged Hansson's first solo exhibition in 1943. Critical reception was strong enough that Hansson soon left teaching entirely to work as a full-time artist.

Her figures, whether children, animals, or landscape elements, carry the influence of expressionism without losing a quality of directness that sometimes tips into naivism. She described her aim as depicting things as they are, not as they appear - a distinction that sounds slight until you see it in the work, where a child's face or a row of animals in a field has an immediacy that more technically polished painting often loses.

In the 1950s Hansson spent a year in South Africa. The experience of apartheid shook her, and she returned to Sweden and made her response visible - in paintings, and in textiles that carried anti-apartheid imagery. This social engagement was not incidental to her art; it was part of the same attention to the lives of ordinary people that drove her depictions of children.

Later in life, as her vision deteriorated, she moved toward sculpture - portraits of children in terracotta and bronze - and toward smaller watercolors made under a magnifying lamp, often depicting biblical subjects. Her range was wider than the single label 'painter of children' suggests.

Hansson's work entered the collections of Nationalmuseum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and she is included in regional museum holdings connected to Jämtland and northern Sweden. She died in Stockholm on September 3, 1994. On Auctionist, her work appears primarily at Norrlands Auktionsverk, Metropol, and Stockholms Auktionsverk, in the form of oil paintings on panel, watercolors, prints, and drawings. Auction prices have reached up to 3,200 SEK, with watercolors and figure studies among the most frequently offered pieces.