Henrik Blomberg, Portrait of a Boy, 1929 | Vendelmans
Henrik Blomberg
Portrait of a Boy, 1929
oil on canvas
116 by 74cm.
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With his beau-laid looks and intense stare, Blomberg's sitter enthrals the viewer. While his idenitiy is unrecorded, it is possibly the artist's fourteen-year old nephew, Åke Blomberg. Following this theory...
With his beau-laid looks and intense stare, Blomberg's sitter enthrals the viewer. While his idenitiy is unrecorded, it is possibly the artist's fourteen-year old nephew, Åke Blomberg. Following this theory - as we may in the context of our private enjoyment of the picture - we can observe that by 1929, young Åke had already borne witness to several of life's misadventures: after the untimely death of his mother, his father had remarried twice. In addition, his father had generated an illegitimate child resulting from a scandalous affair with author Astrid Lindgren - with it subjecting the entire family to the town's gossip mill.
Perhaps the turbulent nature of his youth accounts for the boy's cheerless expression. The melancholic blueness of the room, too, which finds its echo in the eyes of the boy, adds to the weight of the picture's atmosphere. Yet the overarching sense is not one of sadness. Instead, with the raise of a single eyebrow, the boy assures us of his resilience. His pose - hands folded together and resting on his lap - as well as the immaculateness of his attire are not only indicative of his middle-class upbringing, but appear to be an extension of a steadfast disposition.
The present work is illustrative of Henrik Blomberg's (1879-1936) talent as a portrait painter whose approach defied the more stylised efforts of his contemporaries. It is also demonstrative of the artist's understanding of perspective - a subject he taught at the Royal Institute of Art and from 1924 onwards at his own academy in Stockholm. Blomberg is represented in the collections of the Örebro County Museum, the University Library in Uppsala, and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.