Hilding Linnqvist, pencil and watercolour, signed.
Summer sky with cirrus clouds. I. 22 x 30 cm.
Not examined out of the frame, yellowed.
Hilding Linnqvist was born in 1891 in Stockholm, where he also died in 1984, aged 93. He had his studios on Rörstrandsgatan and Bastugatan, among other places, and views from there can be seen in many of his lyrical landscapes. The Moderna Museet collection includes as many as 76 watercolors, oil paintings and drawings by Hilding Linnqvist.
During the autumn of 2021, Hilding Linnqvist will be highly topical with a large solo exhibition at the Nordic Watercolor Museum in Skärhamn.
Being prepared with pencil, ink and watercolor paper, was part of Hilding Linnqvist's artistic nature. He drew and sketched incessantly. He let his hand spontaneously translate what his gaze caught, in order to be able to methodically process the first impression in the future and create from the sketch as an indispensable basis. Sketching was of fundamental importance to Hilding Linnqvist's visual language.
On 26 September 2021, the Nordic Watercolor Museum opens its long-awaited exhibition with about a hundred works by Hilding Linnqvist. It will be an independent continuation after Liljevalch's large exhibition in Stockholm in the autumn of 2020.
”Hilding Linnqvist - a painter poet with his hand on his heart. Hilding Linnqvist belongs to the classics of Swedish art history and his path to success is now being investigated at Liljevalchs. A heartwarming exhibition in a cold time.
Hilding Linnqvist is usually described as a leading figure for the naivety of the 1910s. Liljevalch's new exhibition with the subtitle "Becoming an artist" presents this his early, most beloved production - and the constant search, anything but the straight path to establishment as one of Sweden's great , beloved painters. ”
Excerpt from a review in Dagens Nyheter, 14 October 2020
Hilding Linnqvist is one of Sweden's most important naïve painters and became established and known early on for his colourful compositions. Linnqvist was a key figure in lyrical naivism in Sweden, with a style of painting that departed from the technical perfection he had been trained in. Several Swedish artists joined this innovative direction for the time. After studying at the Technical School and the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, he was inspired by Edward Munch and Ernst Josephson's malaise art, which led him towards a freer and more uninhibited style of painting. During the 1920s, Linnqvist travelled abroad several times and his colours became brighter and his subjects more detailed.
He later painted coastal scenes and portraits, among other things. By the early 1940s, Hilding Linnqvist was an established and well-travelled artist, as well as a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1939-1941 and the subject of a major exhibition there in 1940.