Anna Gardell-Ericson

Anna Gardell-Ericson was an internationally recognised Swedish artist who mainly painted landscapes in watercolour.Her watercolours, inspired by 19th-century French plein-air painting, have been described as having a romantic lustre with ethereal greenery and depth in the pictures. During her long career she was awarded several distinctions and elected to be a member of the Dudley Gallery Art Society in the United Kingdom.

Gardell-Ericson began painting at a very early age and, at the tender age of sixteen, she was sent to Switzerland to study piano. However, while there, she soon switched to art lessons. After returning to Sweden, she later studied under Professor Per Daniel Holm (1835-1903) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, 1872-1888, and participated in the academy’s exhibitions in 1875-1877.

Already as a student, she was recognised as highly talented, and at the Centennial International Exhibition (officially the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, the first official world’s fair to be held in the United States, coinciding with the centennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence’s adoption in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776) in Philadelphia in 1876, she, at the young age of 22, was awarded a bronze medal.

Gardell-Ericson continued her studies under Ferdinand Heilbuth (1826-1889, French painter, originally from Germany, who was a founding member of the Société d’aquarellistes français) in Paris in 1879. In France, she also studied the great French masters and made watercolour copies of paintings by Camille Corot (1796–1875, a pivotal figure in landscape painting, whose vast output simultaneously referenced the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipated the plein-air innovations of Realism and Impressionism) and Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878, French painter, one of the members of the Barbizon school and considered an important precursor of Impressionism).

She participated in the prestigious Paris Salon in 1880 (exhibiting seven watercolours) as well as 1882. She enjoyed great success and several French art dealers paid attention to her paintings, among others Goupil & Cie. She was offered a contract by them of 1,000 francs a month for the right to sell her art. Goupil had branches abroad as well, where her watercolours were sold.

Further international success came with the Foreign Exhibition (American Exhibition of the Products, Arts and Manufactures of Foreign Nations, the world’s fair in America that had hosted the most foreign exhibitors at that time, including China and Japan) in Boston 1883, where she was awarded a medal and a diploma. She was also elected as a member of the English Dudley Gallery Art Society. To this could be added participation in exhibitions in Montreal, London, Munich and many other places.

While in Paris, she met fellow Swedish artist Johan (John) Ericson (1849-1925) whom she married in 1882. Two years later, there were rumours of a cholera epidemic, and the couple returned to Sweden and Gothenburg. Between 1889 and 1890, the couple were joint heads of the Gothenburg Musei Rit- och Målarskola (nowadays HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design). Gardell-Ericson remained very productive and found her landscape subjects in and around Gothenburg or from her old hometown of Visby. Ulla Åshede (born 1949, Swedish freelance author) writes (in Anna Maria Gardell-Ericson, www.skbl.se/sv/artikel/AnnaGardellEricson, Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon, article by Ulla Åshede, retrieved 2025-11-12):

She participated in numerous exhibitions with Swedish art societies like Sveriges allmänna konstförening and Föreningen Svenska Konstnärinnor. Her motifs were taken by preference from the park Slottsskogen in Gothenburg, from the west coast island of Marstrand, where she and John Ericson often spent their summers, from other places on the west coast and from Visby on the Baltic island of Gotland

After her husband passed away in 1925, she moved to Stockholm. That same year she participated with seven works in the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts’ large exhibition of watercolours. Two years later, in 1927, she mounted a solo exhibition at the Stockholm Gummeson Gallery, showing motifs from Sweden and the United Kingdom. The exhibition, which was visited by the then Swedish crown princess Louise (1889-1965), met with great acclaim, and one critic (the signature ‘Eveo’ in the major daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet) wrote about how ‘the movement of the water and the changes in the clouds have sometimes been expressed with pure virtuosity’.

Gardell-Ericson passed away, at the age of 85, in her home in Stockholm in 1939. Shortly before her death, she wrote her memoirs, but these were never published in book form. A memorial exhibition was held at the Wettergren & Kerber bookshop in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1939, and in 1946 Bukowskis in Stockholm mounted an exhibition of her watercolours.

Gardell-Ericson is represented in the collections of Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; the Gothenburg Art Museum, Gothenburg, Sweden; the Gothenburg City Museum, Gothenburg, Sweden; the Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art), Stockholm; the Norrköping Museum of Art, Norrköping, Sweden; the Bohuslän Museum, Uddevalla, Sweden; and several other museums around Sweden and abroad.