On 23 March Nationalmuseum opens an exhibition about the Swedish miniature painter Peter Adolf Hall. He revolutionised the art of miniature portraits in Paris in the latter half of the 18th century and enjoyed great success. But how Hall came by his innovative miniature painting technique, and how he learned or developed this art form, remains a mystery.
Nationalmuseum has acquired a self-portrait by Lié-Louis Périn-Salbreux, a French miniaturist. The piece is one of the artist’s later works and, unlike many of his other self-portraits, is unusually modest and largely free from affectation.
On 17 February the exhibition Swedish Ecstasy opens at Bozar in Brussels, showcasing works by Swedish artists inspired by mysticism and spirituality. As partner in the project, Nationalmuseum is providing 40 works by Carl Fredrik Hill, Ernst Josephson and August Strindberg on loan.
Nationalmuseum has acquired three views of French gardens and parks painted in the latter half of the 18th century by Louis-Gabriel Moreau and Alexandre Dunouy. The park at Ermenonville features in two of the paintings, one of which shows the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau picking flowers.
The Garden – Six Centuries of Art and Nature takes the form of a grand tour showing how gardens have been portrayed in art. The exhibition includes more than 300 paintings, drawings, applied art and sculpture. Artists on display include Watteau, Boucher, Oudry, Le Nôtre, Monet and Carl Larsson and, from contemporary times, Peter Frie and Emma Helle.
The Wiurila Chair, designed by Bernadotte & Kylberg, has been donated to the Nationalmuseum collection. Created for a restaurant at Wiurila, a manor house at Halikko in southern Finland, the chair was donated by the Finnish design business Made by Choice.
The Young Scholars programme aims to offer recent graduates the chance to pursue short research projects at Nationalmuseum. Over the next year, the museum will facilitate at least two such projects thanks to external funding from the Beijer Foundation and the Ulf Gillberg–Lennart Agerberg Foundation.
Nationalmuseum has acquired a portrait of Marie-Gabrielle Capet, a French painter of pastels and miniatures. The portrait depicts the artist in the 1780s, when she was a close associate of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, one of the most celebrated portrait painters of the day, and her future husband François-André Vincent.
The 2022 Portrait of Honour depicts the artist Britta Marakatt-Labba, known around the world for her embroidered images of Sami landscapes with both a poetic and a political message. The portrait is the work of Marja Helander, whose photographs of Sami landscapes, people and culture have won multiple awards.
Nationalmuseum has acquired a landscape by the French naturalist painter Jean-François Raffaëlli, one of the foremost role models for the Swedish artists who travelled to Paris in the 1880s.
The 2023 exhibition programme at Nationalmuseum offers a mix of garden art, miniatures and American crafts.
The painting of Bartholomew the Apostle by the Italian painter Luca Giordano has been donated to Nationalmuseum, the first painting in the collections by this famous Baroque artist from Naples whose final years were spent as painter at the Spanish court.
