Swedish, 1858-1930,Swedish painter, draughtsman and illustrator. From 1874 he studied at the Konstakademi in Stockholm, where he soon became a friend of Richard Bergh and Karl Nordstrem, both of whom were later prominent exponents of the more advanced Swedish painting of the 1880s and 1890s. After being forced to interrupt his studies because of illness, Kreuger trained from 1878 at the art school of Edvard Perseus (1841-90) in Stockholm before he travelled to Paris, where he stayed for the most part until 1887. He made his d?but at the Paris Salon in 1882, and he also resided in the artists' colony in Grez-sur-Loing. During this period he painted such works as Old Country House (1887; Stockholm, Nmus.) with a free brushwork and sense of light that owed much to Jules Bastien-Lepage. In 1885 Kreuger was active in organizing the Opponenterna, a protest movement led by Ernst Josephson against the conservative establishment of the Konstakademi in Stockholm, and the following year he helped to found the Konstn?rsf?rbund (Artists' Union). Like the majority of the Konstnersferbund's members, Kreuger abandoned the French-inspired plein-air realism of the 1880s for symbolically coloured National Romanticism in the 1890s. For Kreuger this change took place between 1893 and 1896 in Varberg on the west coast of Sweden, where, together with Bergh and Nordstrem, he founded the Varberg Group. Drawing on Paul Gauguin's Synthetism, the group contributed to the formation of the National Romantic style of the 1890s in Sweden. Kreuger's encounter with van Gogh's drawings at an exhibition in Copenhagen in 1893 also played a decisive role in his development. He devised an intensely personal style in which the landscape was composed in large blocks that were then covered by a pattern of directional lines and dots in India ink (somewhat in the manner of van Gogh's late landscape drawings) to bring out the painting's colour values and create an effect of decoratively stylized forms: for example Spring in Halland (1894; Stockholm, Nmus.). Kreuger was also a prolific draughtsman and illustrator.   Related Paintings of Nils Kreuger :. | var i hanand | i solgasset, motiv fran alvaret, oland | karl nordstrom varbergs faste | solbelysta moln | vinterkvall i varberg |
Related Artists:
Andrei Ivanov
1775-1848 Russian Andrei Ivanov Gallery
Carl Reichert
Austrian 1836-1918
HALL, Peter Adolf
1739-1793 Swedish painter and collector. In 1753 he attended Uppsala Universitet to study medicine and natural history. In 1755 he went on a study trip abroad, led by his drawing-master Lars Brisman. While in Germany (1756-9) he studied miniature painting with Eichhardt in Berlin and with Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Richard (1725-70) in Hamburg. After this trip, he decided to become a professional portrait painter, and in 1759 he enrolled at the Kungliga Akademi for de Fria Konsterna in Stockholm, studying drawing with the French sculptor Pierre-Hubert Larchaveque (1721-78) and painting with Gustaf Lundberg. He attracted the attention of C. F. Adelcrantz, who in 1766 gained for him a commission for the pastel portrait of Princes Karl and Fredrik Adolf. In that year he also executed a miniature portrait of Crown Prince Gustav on the occasion of his engagement to Princess Sophia Magdalena of Denmark. Also in 1766 he received a royal travel grant to study in Paris, where he developed a completely new technique of miniature painting using sweeping brushwork and a clear and fresh range of colour that allowed for lively characterization. He made exquisite detailed studies of the backgrounds of his paintings, as well as his sitters costumes and their attributes and accessories. His new technique involved applying gouache to the ivory in a manner that allowed the ivory to show through, a method that was particularly successful in depicting drapery. The smooth surface of the ivory also allowed freer brushwork associated with full-scale portraits.