Olof Arborelius | 1842- 1915
Olof Per Ulrik Arborelius, born November 4, 1842 in Orsa, died June 2, 1915 in Stockholm, was a Swedish folk life and landscape painter and professor at the Art Academy in Stockholm 1902–1909. The genus Arborelius originates from Arboga.
Olof Arborelius was the son of the priest and dialect researcher Olof Ulric Arborelius and his third wife Charlotta Dorotea Friman and the brother of the architect Rudolf Arborelius. He married in 1873 his cousin Hedvig Maria Arborelius. After seven years of study at the Art Academy, Arborelius went on a three-year study tour in Europe. When he returned to Sweden in 1872, he was appointed agré at the Art Academy. For a few years he worked as a senior teacher there and at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 1902 he was appointed professor at the Academy of Arts. Olof Arborelius was shaped by Swedish genre painting in the 1860s and was closely associated with the Düsseldorf school. He did join the opposition movement early on in the 1880s but was very little influenced by impressionist painting. In the choice of motifs, however, he adopted the free realism of his opponents. In later years, he developed ever clearer colors and a greater monumentality in the compositions In particular, Fritz von Dardel particularly criticized the use of the color green. Characteristic of his works are folk life motifs from his home village in Dalarna.
Arborelius is represented in several public collections, including the National Museum, Gothenburg Art Museum, Örebro County Museum, Norrköping Art Museum, Athenaeum in Helsinki, Upplandsmuseet, Uppsala University Library and the Nordic Museum.
Survivors of the artist have on several occasions donated material to the Academy of Arts. This includes several sketchbooks from his youth. In one of Olof Arborelius's sketchbooks it was found in 1998 that the artist had pasted several stamps on a spread. The stamps, 22 in number, all come from different European countries and were issued in the 1850s. They were probably put in place in 1858, forgotten and remained untouched for 140 years. This is probably the oldest stamp collection in the world that remains in its original condition. Since 1999, the Art Academy has deposited this sketchbook at the Postmuseum in Stockholm.
