At the first live auction of the spring, The Signature Sale, we are delighted to present two significant and culturally important collections of works by Gunnar Widforss (1879–1934), one of Sweden’s most distinguished and internationally recognised landscape painters.

What makes these collections particularly unique is their provenance: one comes directly from the artist’s family, the other from a close friend of Widforss. Together, they offer an unusually intimate, nuanced and personal insight into his artistic practice.

The collections span several periods of Widforss’s life and include both finished paintings and studies in a range of techniques. Viewers encounter well-known vistas alongside more private and exploratory works—images that testify to his lifelong fascination with nature and his exceptional ability to render light, space and atmosphere with great sensitivity and precision.

Gunnar Widforss was born in Stockholm in 1879 and trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. From an early stage he focused on landscape painting, an interest that came to define his entire artistic career. Through travels in Europe and later an extended stay in the United States, he found motifs that contributed to an increasingly personal and powerful expression.

Today, Widforss is especially renowned for his depictions of the dramatic landscapes of the American national parks, most notably the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Zion. In these works, a Nordic, lyrical sensibility is combined with the monumental scale of the American West. The result is a body of work that conveys both the grandeur of nature and a quiet, contemplative presence—qualities that have secured his position as one of the foremost interpreters of these landscapes in the history of painting.

The two collections presented here offer a rare opportunity to explore Gunnar Widforss’s life and art through works preserved and passed down by those who were closest to him. They present an encounter with an artistic practice in both its public and private dimensions—and with an artist whose images continue to resonate and captivate far beyond his own time.