KunstenaarSwedish
John Bauer
3 actieve items
John Albert Bauer (1882-1918) gave visual form to Swedish folklore in ways that remain embedded in the country's cultural imagination more than a century after his death. Born on 4 June 1882 in Jönköping, a city on the southern shore of Lake Vättern, he grew up on the edge of the forests of Småland. Long walks through dense woodland as a child, combined with folk stories told by his maternal grandmother, planted the images that would define his art: moss-covered boulders, ancient spruces filtering pale light, and creatures from a world older than human settlement.
At sixteen, Bauer moved to Stockholm to study at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. He applied in 1898 but was considered too young despite being deemed qualified. After two years at Caleb Althin's painting school, he entered the Academy in 1900. There he met Ester Ellqvist, a fellow art student, whom he married in 1906. The couple traveled to Italy in 1908, spending time in Volterra, Florence, Siena, Rome, and Capri. Italian Renaissance painting left a lasting mark on his sense of composition.
Bauer's most significant body of work is his contribution to Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls), an annual Christmas anthology of Swedish fairy tales first published in 1907. He illustrated the volumes from 1907 to 1915, producing watercolors and pen drawings that defined how generations of Swedes pictured trolls, forest spirits, and brave children venturing into enchanted woods. Among the most recognized is "Ännu sitter Tuvstarr kvar och ser ner i vattnet" (1913). His trolls are not purely menacing; they are heavy, weathered, sometimes melancholy figures that seem to grow from the landscape itself.
In the autumn of 1918, Bauer, Ester, and their three-year-old son Bengt were relocating from Jönköping to Stockholm. On the night of 20 November, the steamer Per Brahe capsized in a storm on Lake Vättern. All 24 people on board drowned. Bauer was 36.
The Jönköpings Läns Museum holds over 1,000 of his works. On Auctionist, 109 items have been recorded across multiple categories. Bukowskis Stockholm leads with 28 lots, followed by Crafoord Auktioner Stockholm with 12. Original works command significant prices: "Pojke på stol" reached 29,500 SEK, three signed troll lithographs sold for 27,000 SEK, and "Prinsessan och småtrollen" achieved 13,011 EUR.