Ten Swedish artists worth knowing, and how to recognise them

Why do so many famous Swedish artists come from the same few decades?

Because one generation went to France, came back, and decided to paint Sweden. In the 1870s and 1880s young Swedish painters trained in Paris and spent summers in artists' colonies such as Grez-sur-Loing, painting outdoors in the French manner. In 1885 a group of them, later known as the Opponents, publicly challenged the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm over how art should be taught and shown.

Back home in the 1890s, many of them turned to Swedish light, Swedish landscape and Swedish domestic life. That turn is usually called National Romanticism, meaning art that treats the country's own nature and traditions as its central subject. It is one of several art movements that took a distinctly Nordic form. A second wave followed around 1909, when painters who had studied with Henri Matisse in Paris returned with flat, loud colour and exhibited together as De unga, the Young Ones.

Most of the names below belong to one of those two moments. That is why they cluster, and why they hang next to each other in Stockholm.

Who are the ten, and what does their work look like?

Carl Larsson (1853 to 1919)

Carl Larsson painted his own family at home in Lilla Hyttnäs, the house in Sundborn, Dalarna, that he and the artist and designer Karin Larsson filled with light colours and handmade textiles. Look for watercolour, clear outlines, children, open doors and flowers on the table. His book of watercolours, Ett hem (A Home), published in 1899, did more to shape the idea of a Swedish interior than almost anything else. His largest painting, Midvinterblot (1915), was refused by the museum it was painted for and now hangs in the stairwell of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, where it was meant to go.

Anders Zorn (1860 to 1920)

Anders Zorn painted fast, confident brushstrokes with very few colours, a restraint often called the Zorn palette. Look for water reflections, bathers outdoors, firelight, the people of Mora in Dalarna, and portraits of wealthy Americans. Zorn was also one of the most admired etchers of his time, which matters for owners today, because etchings were printed in editions and original Zorn prints are far more common than his paintings. Midsummer Dance (1897) is at Nationalmuseum, and his home in Mora is the Zorn Museum.

Bruno Liljefors (1860 to 1939)

Bruno Liljefors painted animals in the places they actually live: foxes in snow, birds in reeds, hares half hidden in grass. Look for wildlife that is camouflaged rather than posed, often at the moment of a hunt. Fox Family (1886) is among his best known works.

Ernst Josephson (1851 to 1906)

Ernst Josephson painted rich, dark figure paintings and Nordic folklore, most famously Strömkarlen (The Water Sprite), a naked fiddler in a waterfall, from 1884. After a severe psychotic illness in 1888 he made drawings and paintings in a freer, stranger line that later modernists admired as their own forerunner. Look for intense colour in the early work and visionary, unsteady figures in the late.

Prince Eugen (1865 to 1947)

Prince Eugen, a son of King Oscar II, chose to be a painter and was a serious one. Look for quiet Swedish landscapes at dusk, large skies and a single strong cloud, as in The Cloud (1895). His home on Djurgården in Stockholm, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, is now a museum with his collection of his contemporaries.

Hilma af Klint (1862 to 1944)

Hilma af Klint was trained as a conventional landscape and portrait painter, and from 1906 she made large abstract paintings, years before the artists usually credited with inventing abstraction. Look for spirals, petals, letters and diagrams in soft pinks, ochres and blues, painted in numbered series. The Ten Largest (1907) are each more than three metres tall. She asked that the abstract work be kept from the public until twenty years after her death, and it reached a wide audience only from the 1980s onwards.

Isaac Grünewald (1889 to 1946)

Isaac Grünewald studied with Matisse in Paris and became the loudest voice of Swedish modernism. Look for strong, unmixed colour, rhythmic composition and city views that seem to sway. The Singing Tree (1915) is a good place to start. He died in a plane crash in 1946.

Sigrid Hjertén (1885 to 1948)

Sigrid Hjertén also trained with Matisse, married Grünewald, and painted Stockholm, their studio and their son with a boldness critics of the time often dismissed. Look for flattened space, mask-like faces, and harbour views seen from a high window. Studio Interior (1916), showing the couple's studio as a stage, is at Moderna Museet. Her reputation has risen steadily since her death.

Nils Dardel (1888 to 1943)

Nils Dardel painted elegant, slightly unreal figures with a stylised, almost naive line, often in theatrical or melancholy scenes. Look for slim young men, pale faces and dreamlike settings. The Dying Dandy (1918), at Moderna Museet, is one of the most reproduced Swedish paintings of the twentieth century.

Carl Milles (1875 to 1955)

Carl Milles made bronze sculpture and fountains, and his figures seem to float. Look for elongated bodies, mythology and water. The Orpheus Fountain (1936) stands outside the Stockholm Concert Hall, and his home and sculpture garden on Lidingö is Millesgården.

Where can you see their work in Sweden?

Collections rotate, so check what is on display before travelling for one particular work.

What if one of these artists hangs in your home?

The first question is what kind of object it is, because the same image can exist in three very different forms.

1. An original work. A painting, watercolour or drawing made by the artist's own hand. Under raking light, a painting has texture: ridges of paint, brush marks, a canvas weave. These are rare and usually well documented.
2. An original print. An etching, meaning a print made from a metal plate the artist drew into, or a lithograph made from a drawn stone. Each sheet is printed from the artist's own plate or stone, often signed in pencil and sometimes numbered, such as 12/50. Zorn's etchings are the Swedish example people most often own.
3. A reproduction. A photographic copy of a work, printed mechanically. Under a magnifying glass a modern offset print shows a regular pattern of tiny coloured dots. Most Carl Larsson images in Swedish homes are reproductions of the Ett hem watercolours, and they are loved for good reason, but they are not originals.

When you are not sure which you have, photograph the front and the back, measure the sheet or canvas, and note any signature, number, stamp or label exactly as written. Most large Swedish auction houses will give a first assessment from photographs at no charge.

How should you describe a work like this in your own records?

Name the artist the way museums do: Anders Zorn, not just Zorn, and Prince Eugen rather than a nickname. Say what the object is as precisely as you can, such as "etching on paper" or "offset reproduction, framed", because that one phrase decides most of what the work is worth. Record what you know and what you only believe, separately. A note that reads "bought by my grandmother in Mora, 1950s, family account" is evidence. A confident "original" written by nobody in particular is not.

A catalogue made for artworks keeps those details together with the photographs, which is where they are usually lost. A notebook in the same drawer as the receipts will also do.