Porträtt av konstnärskollegan Einar Forseth

Axel Fridell occupies a distinctive place in early twentieth-century Swedish art. Although celebrated in Scandinavia as one of the great Swedish printmakers of his generation, his work remains comparatively less known to an international audience. Trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Fridell developed an intensely personal form of realism, indebted to the graphic traditions of Rembrandt, Whistler and Munch. Painting, however, formed only a small part of his production: oils by Fridell are notably rare, and the present canvas belongs to a particularly compelling group of portraits of fellow artists made during his formative years.
Painted in 1915, when Fridell was just twenty, the present work depicts his friend and fellow Academy student Einar Forseth (1892-1988), later celebrated for the monumental mosaics of Stockholm City Hall's Golden Hall. Here, emerging almost spectrally from the dark background, Forseth meets the viewer with an arresting, sideways gaze. The bottles and glass before him place the portrait within the bohemian world inhabited by the young artists, while Fridell's flashes of red, blue and white against the lugubrious canvas lend the image a striking psychological intensity.
The painting was first offered through Konstidkarnes Lotteri, a Swedish art lottery through which works by contemporary artists were distributed to subscribers by draw. Such lotteries played an important role in bringing modern Swedish art into private collections while directly supporting living artists.