Einar Jónsson

Biography

The statue of Thorfinn Karlsefni was unveiled in Philadelphia on 20 November 1920, on Kelly Drive. The Icelandic explorer of the eleventh century is shown as the first European to set foot on American soil. The commission came from an American patron, through a fund held by the Fairmount Park Art Association.

Einar Jónsson was born on 11 May 1874 on the farm of Galtafell in southern Iceland, into a farming family. His brother was the painter Ásgrímur Jónsson. There was almost no tradition of sculpture in the country, and in 1893 he left for Denmark. In Copenhagen he studied at the Academy of Art; among his teachers Stephan Abel Sinding is named. His first solo exhibition took place in 1901 at Charlottenborg Palace, and afterwards he received a grant from the Althing, the Icelandic parliament. According to some accounts, the grant was made in 1902 for two years of study in Rome; he then returned to Copenhagen and settled there. He also lived in Germany.

In Rome, as the museum that bears his name tells it, he rejected naturalistic depiction and publicly criticised the classical tradition, which he felt had weighed artists down. His ideas were close to German symbolism: he developed a language of symbols, personifications and allegories. Among his early works are “The Outlaw” (1900), “Dawn” (1897–1906) and “Pioneer” (1902–11).

In 1909, after almost twenty years abroad, he came to an arrangement with the Althing: it would provide him with a house and studio in Reykjavík, and he would give the country all his works. He designed the house and studio together with the architect Einar Erlendsson; earlier plans by the State Architect, Guðjón Samúelsson, were never carried out.

In 1914 a commission came from Philadelphia for a statue of Thorfinn Karlsefni, on which he worked in 1915–1918. In 1917, the day after his marriage to Anne Marie Jørgensen, he and his wife left for the United States to complete the work. In 1921 a cast of his monument to Jón Sigurðsson, bought by the Icelandic community in Manitoba, was erected in Winnipeg, in the grounds of the Manitoba Legislative Building; on the base, as in Reykjavík, is the relief “The Pioneers”. His memorial to the heroes of the First World War in Winnipeg is also well known, though I have found no confirmation that it is the same work.

After two years in America Einar returned to Iceland. He made almost everything in plaster, partly because good modelling clay was scarce, but also because plaster let him return to a single piece for years. On some works he spent more than ten years: “Guilty Conscience” (1911–47), “End” (1906–38), “Trees of Life and Death” (1909–40).

His work falls into three groups. The first is public monuments, among them Jónas Hallgrímsson (1907), Jón Sigurðsson (1911), King Christian IX (1915), Hallgrímur Pétursson (1922), Ingólfur Arnarson (1924) and Hannes Hafstein (1931). The second is private commissions, portraits and cemetery monuments, including a memorial to the Eisert family of Lodz (1935) and a monument to Dr Charcot and his ship (1936). The third is private works, in which he went ever deeper into spiritual themes: Christian subjects, Icelandic mythology, folk tales, the hidden people, trolls and angels. These figures do not always lend themselves to explanation, but a symbolic layer can be felt in them throughout. In “Skuld” he uses the image of the Norns, the women of fate. The American scholar Henry Goddard Leach called William Blake his nearest spiritual relative.

Later the plasters were cast in bronze and placed in the garden of his house and in city parks in Reykjavík and elsewhere in Iceland. The Einar Jónsson Museum in Reykjavík, to which he gave his works, opened in 1923.

Einar Jónsson died in Reykjavík on 18 October 1954.