Josefina Holmlund
Josefina Holmlund belongs to a pioneering generation of Swedish female artist’s that came to prominence in the second half of the 19th century. Focusing her artistic talent predominantly on landscape painting she kept abreast of the latest developments in the genre. Her production thus reflects the rapidly developing discipline as it blossomed and reached new heights just before the turn of the century 1900. Even though her earliest works are clearly dependent on the traditional academic style she was taught, as an external student, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, her late period works are clearly influenced by the teachings of the French plein-air painting as it developed from c. 1850 and onwards.
Josefina Holmlund was born in Stockholm in 1827. Being the daughter of an affluent wholesale merchant, Holmlund grew up in a relatively wealthy home. The idyllic middle-class upbringing also seems to have embraced progressive liberal ideas, since Josefina, and her older sister Jeanette (1825 – 1872), both were allowed to train as professional artists. As early as 1849, Jeanette Holmlund became one of four females accepted as students at the Royal Swedish Academy of Art in Stockholm: the other three being Lea Ahlborn (1826 - 1897), Agnes Börjesson (1827 - 1900) and Amalia Lindegren (1814 - 1891). Between 1851 and 1854, she was a student of the genre painter Vautier in Paris. On her return to Stockholm, she founded and managed an art studio for female students. From 1858, Jeanette Möller (she had married Norwegian landscape painter Niels Björnson Möller in 1860) spent her time divided between Sweden and Düsseldorf, and she was an agré of the Royal Swedish Academy of Art from 1861.
Josefina Holmlund soon followed in her sister’s footsteps and started taking lessons in landscape painting, in the 1850s, for Tore Billing (1816 – 1892) and Edvard Bergh (1828 – 1880, Bergh would later, in 1857, go on to establish a specific landscape painting school at the Royal Academy and became a professor there in 1861). Holmlund, besides attending courses at Slöjdskolan (nowadays Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design), was probably also an external student at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. A subsequent trip to Germany would prove of decisive importance for Holmlund’s artistic development. Hans Lindholm Öjmyr writes (‘Josefina Holmlund’, article in Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon, retrieved 2024-09-08):
In the 1860s, Josefina Holmlund travelled to Düsseldorf where she lived in the home of her sister Jeanette Möller, whose husband, the Norwegian landscape painter Nils Björnson Möller, gave Josefina Holmlund lessons. In Düsseldorf, she dedicated herself to the painting tradition that had developed at the Düsseldorf art academy. Landscapes were depicted with great richness of detail and were well composed, preferably with a slightly anecdotal element in the form of some persons, animals or a boat. In her late painting, Josefina Holmlund moved on to a purer form of outdoor painting. The anecdotal elements disappeared, and nature was more directly depicted. It was still magnificent natural views, in particular the Norwegian ones, that attracted her interest.
Even though a very productive artist, Holmlund, as pointed out by Lindholm Öjmyr, is sparingly represented in Swedish museums. Her paintings turn up regularly however at auctions. She is an example of an established artist who has partly ended up outside Swedish art history. Works by Josefina Holmlund are to be found in the Länsmuseet in Gävleborg and in the Helsingborg museums. Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and the Gothenburg Art Museum each acquired their first paintings by the artist as late as the 2000s.
Josefina Holmlund died in Stockholm in 1905. She is buried in Norra begravningsplatsen (the Northern Cemetery) in Solna.
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