KunstenaarSwedish
Per-Hilding Perjons
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Per-Hilding Perjons was born on 21 February 1911 in Floda parish, Dalarna, in the village of Hagen, and he would spend virtually his entire life within a few kilometres of where he entered the world. His family name came from his father, Perjons Per Eriksson, a man of broad intellectual curiosity who opened an ethnological museum in his own home as early as 1905, collecting and preserving the material culture of rural Dalarna. Growing up surrounded by that spirit of documentation and observation, Per-Hilding took his own path into art rather than scholarship.
At around the age of sixteen, he traveled to Stockholm to study at Fredrikssons private art school, one of the smaller teaching studios outside the main academy system that served aspiring provincial painters during the early twentieth century. He supplemented this with correspondence courses in painting, but by his own account and by how his work developed, he was in the decisive ways self-taught. The distance from formal institutional instruction seems to have suited him: it left room for the particular warmth and directness of observation that defines his canvases.
Perjons worked almost exclusively in oil on canvas throughout his career, a medium he handled with consistent control and without ostentation. His range of subjects was coherent but varied: portraits of local people, nude studies painted with an unsentimentally attentive eye, interior scenes with figures in lamplight or gathered at a table, still lifes with flowers, and landscapes of the Dala river valley and the wooded terrain around Dala-Floda. The Dalecarlian landscape appears repeatedly in his work, handled in the harmonious, saturated colors associated with the region's painting tradition without tipping into the decorative. Among his dated works, pieces from the 1940s and 1960s survive, and titles such as Blomstertid (1949), Infart Floda, and Motiv från Dala-Floda suggest a painter consistently rooted in the places and seasons he knew intimately.
Unlike many regional artists of his generation who eventually relocated to urban centers, Perjons remained in Dala-Floda and built a livelihood from his painting, one of the few Swedish provincial artists of the period to genuinely support a family through art sales alone. After his death on 29 December 1998, his farm in Hagen, Perjonsgården, was preserved and put under the care of the Perjonsstiftelsen, a foundation that maintains the property as a working museum and holds regular exhibitions of his work. The site remains open to visitors and forms part of the cultural landscape of Dalarna.
On the Nordic secondary market, Perjons appears consistently at auction houses across south-central and western Sweden. His 29 works tracked on Auctionist show a concentration at Halmstads Auktionskammare, which has handled 13 lots, followed by RA Auktionsverket Norrköping, Gomér and Andersson Jönköping, and Uppsala Auktionskammare. Top results include an oil on canvas at 5,600 SEK and a nude study dated 1948 at 4,100 SEK. With 5 works currently active at auction, his paintings continue to circulate steadily in the regional market.