Nils Nilsson Skum

Skum became a skilled herder himself, building up a substantial reindeer herd in his adult years. It was not until the hardships of the 1930s forced a break from active herding that he devoted himself fully to art - though drawing and making objects had been part of his life long before that. He was entirely self-taught, learning no formal artistic method and belonging to no school. He worked primarily in pencil and chalk at a small scale, alongside a number of oil paintings, and he also carved and decorated knife handles and sheaths in the duodji tradition, several of which have appeared at auction.

His subjects were singular and consistent: the eight seasons of Sámi nomadic life, the reindeer herd moving across open terrain, the camps, the dogs, the wolves, and the men and women who managed all of it. The drawings are dense with observed detail - the gait of individual animals, the tying of loads, the formation of a herd in motion. Over a working life that stretched from around 1910 to 1950, he produced more than 3,000 drawings.

Skum came to wider attention through two channels. In 1937, his work was shown at the World's Fair in Paris under the banner of Swedish folklore, exposing it to an international audience for the first time. The following year, 1938, his book Same sita - lappbyn was published by the Nordic Museum's ACTA series. The book contained around 100 pencil and chalk drawings depicting the nomadic year across all its seasons, accompanied by Skum's own texts in Sámi, translated into Swedish by the ethnographer Israel Ruong. It became a foundational document in Sámi cultural history, valued both as art and as ethnographic record.

Skum's position among the earliest generation of Sámi visual artists working within a Western art framework - alongside Johan Turi - remains significant. His work did not seek to adapt Sámi life to outside aesthetic norms; it documented that life from inside, with authority and purpose. He died on December 27, 1951, in Gällivare. His work is held at Nationalmuseum and Nordiska museet in Stockholm, and has been shown at Bildmuseet in Umeå and Magasin III.

At auction, Skum's work has passed through Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5 and Norrlands Auktionsverk with some frequency, reflecting sustained interest among Nordic collectors. Categories at sale span paintings, drawings, and collectibles including carved objects. Top results include a decorated helhornskniv (antler-horn knife) at around €12,500, a drawing of a bear family (Björnfamilj) at SEK 8,700, and a painting of a reindeer herd (Renhjord) at SEK 8,000. Duodji objects with his signature, such as knife sheaths decorated with reindeer, wolf, and bear motifs, represent a distinct collecting category separate from his paper works.