Einar Jolin

In Paris, Jolin became part of the inner circle of Scandinavian students who would return home and reorient Swedish painting. Oriental art encountered at the Musee Guimet proved as formative as Matisse himself, Chinese and Japanese aesthetics gave Jolin the vocabulary of flat planes, delicate line and restrained colour that became the signature of his mature work. His style diverges from orthodox expressionism in that it simplifies and refines rather than distorts: he described his aim as painting "the beautiful," constructing an imagined reality rather than recording raw sensation.

Back in Stockholm, Jolin was a founding presence in De Atta (The Eight), formed in 1912 alongside Grunewald, Sigrid Hjerten, Nils Dardel and Leander Engstrom, the generation credited with introducing modernism to Sweden. His Stockholm motifs from the 1910s and 1920s, Strandvagen in winter light, views over Riddarholmen, the life of the inner city, are among the most distinctive images of the Swedish capital from that era. He worked in oils and watercolours, painting portraits, fruit still lifes and Mediterranean scenes from his travels to Capri, North Africa, India and the West Indies.

From the mid-1930s Jolin's subject matter shifted: he moved away from the modernist programme and toward a softer world of fashionable interiors, elegantly dressed figures and Stockholm street life rendered in a warm, harmonious palette. This later work has its own distinct character, more intimate in ambition, more concerned with pleasure and atmosphere than with formal experiment.

At auction, Jolin's paintings appear regularly at the major Swedish houses. Stockholm motifs and figurative works command the strongest interest, with oils reaching into the tens of thousands of Swedish kronor. The Nationalmuseum holds his 1914 canvas Utsikt over Riddarholmen, and his top recorded auction price internationally reached 540,000 USD at Bukowskis in 2018 for Modell i svart pals. Within the Nordic market tracked here, his oils have sold for up to 30,000 SEK, with Stockholms strom, Strandvagen leading the results. Stockholms Auktionsverk, Uppsala Auktionskammare and Bukowskis account for the majority of his lots.