Primus Mortimer Pettersson

He was born on 1 July 1895 in Ostersund. His father was a tile stove maker, and the family moved early to Froso, the island in Lake Storsjoen just outside the town. At fourteen, restless and unhappy with the prospect of decorative painting commissions in Ostersund, he went to sea. For more than a decade he worked as a sailor, visiting ports in Europe, Africa, South America, China, Japan, and the United States. The years at sea were hard. He suffered persistent depression, and sometime during the First World War, off the coast of Korea, he experienced a breakdown and jumped overboard. He was rescued. In 1923, now in California, he was admitted to Stockton Hospital outside San Francisco. He returned to Sweden in 1925 and was declared legally incompetent in 1929, after which he was admitted to Froso Hospital, where he would remain until his death on 19 May 1975.

He began painting in March 1935, encouraged by the hospital's chief physician John Agerberg, who was an early advocate of occupational therapy. Agerberg understood that for Pettersson, painting was not a therapeutic exercise but a compulsion. The work was first shown publicly at a crafts exhibition in Ostersund in 1936. For decades afterwards it attracted limited attention, partly because some of his output was destroyed on the orders of a later hospital administrator who believed a smaller inventory would raise the value of the remaining works.

His subjects are houses: towers, villas, farmyards, pagodas, castles, coastal buildings, and unidentifiable structures that exist in no particular geography. The motifs are drawn from memory, from the places he had seen during his years at sea, and from a visual imagination that recombined real fragments into entirely personal architectures. The buildings are monumental but the streets are empty. Windows are dark or glow with theatrical inner light. Skies burn with reds, oranges, and violets that have no meteorological equivalent. The works have no narrative content in any conventional sense; they are records of a private visual world.

In the early 1960s, as interest in naive art grew internationally, Pettersson's work began to reach audiences outside Jamtland. An exhibition in Basel in 1961 drew wider attention. The breakthrough came with a major exhibition at Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet in Stockholm in 1966. He is today represented in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Norrkoping Art Museum, Kalmar Art Museum, and Magasin III. The Jamtland Harjedalen region holds around 400 works from a donation by his relatives, displayed in a dedicated Primus Room in Ostersund created in 2008.

At auction on Auctionist, 32 items are indexed, the great majority paintings, with a small number of drawings. Sold prices range from 404 EUR to 40,000 EUR, with a median around 3,955 EUR and an average above 9,000 EUR. His work appears through Stockholms Auktionsverk, Bukowskis, Norrlands Auktionsverk, and Stadsauktion Sundsvall, among others. Watercolours and oil-on-panel works both trade actively, with urban and architectural motifs attracting the strongest prices.