John Bauer

Biography

Bauer began his trip to Lappland with misgivings: the publisher Carl Adam Victor Lundholm was putting together a lavish book about the north of Sweden, where well-known artists were already at work, and he first sent the newcomer to Skansen, the open-air museum in Stockholm, with a trial assignment to draw Sami people. On 15 July 1904 Bauer did set off for the north and spent about a month there.

He had grown up among the dense, dark forests of Småland, and the open views overwhelmed him. He took photographs and made sketches and notes of tools, clothing and household objects. He did not manage to get close to the Sami, as he wrote himself in his diary and in letters to his family. He painted the eleven watercolours for the book in Stockholm almost a year and a half later, working from photographs and sketches; the book came out in 1908. The bent knives, shoes, spears, pots and belts later passed into the costumes of his trolls.

Bauer was born on 4 June 1882 in Jönköping. His father, Josef Bauer, a native of Bavaria, had come to Sweden in 1863 almost penniless and set up a charcuterie business; his mother, Emma Charlotta Wadell, came from a farming family in Rogberga. Until 1881 the family lived above the shop, then moved to their own house at Sjövik on the shore of Lake Rocksjön. John had two brothers and a sister, Anna, who died in childhood. He attended the Jönköping Technical School (1892–1898), drew caricatures of his teachers and, by some accounts, daydreamed a great deal in class. His family did not encourage his interest in drawing, but when at sixteen he wanted to go to Stockholm to study painting, his parents supported him with money.

In 1898 he was one of forty applicants to the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. His preparation was judged good, but he was thought too young. He spent two years at Kaleb Ahltin’s school of painting. In 1900 he was admitted to the academy: of all the applicants three were taken, among them his friends Ivar Kamke and Pontus Lanner. He studied traditional illustration and drew plants and medieval costumes. His teacher Gustaf Cederström praised his work: small in size, it made a stronger impression than many huge canvases. While still a student Bauer received his first commissions from magazines (Söndags-Nisse, Snöflingan) and book publishers. At the end of 1905 he left the academy and had the word “Artist” printed on his business card.

He met Ester Ellqvist at the same academy; women studied there in a separate class. The courtship began in 1903 and was conducted mostly in letters. Ester became his “fairy princess”: he portrayed her as such in the oil painting “The Fairy Princess” (Sagoprinsessan), with sketches from 1904, finished in 1905. The painting was shown at Bauer’s first exhibition in Gothenburg in 1905, then in Norrköping, where a private collector bought it; today it is in the Jönköping County Museum. His parents did not approve of the engagement, thinking he should first get established, and Bauer lived partly on his father’s money all his life. They married on 18 December 1906.

In 1907 the publishing house Åhlén & Åkerlund asked him to illustrate a new annual anthology, “Among Gnomes and Trolls”. His trolls are grey, green and brown, the colours of the forest, as if they had grown out of the landscape itself. Until 1910 the books were printed in two colours, black and yellow. In 1911 Bauer demanded that the originals and the copyright stay with him; the publisher refused, brought out the volume without his pictures, and sales fell. In 1912 the publisher gave way. In 1913, at the peak of his work on the series, he painted “Still, Tuvstarr Sits and Gazes Down into the Water” (Ännu sitter Tuvstarr kvar och ser ner i vattnet), one of his best-known pictures. He made his last illustrations for the anthology in 1915. The war, he said, had changed his outlook, and the world no longer seemed to him a fairy tale.

In 1908–1909, at his father’s expense, he and his wife travelled through Germany and Italy: Verona, Florence, Siena, two months in Volterra, Naples, Capri, a winter in Rome. His sketchbooks are full of studies of antique objects and Renaissance art. A portrait by Botticelli is said to have been the basis for the illustration “The Swan Maiden”, and Piero della Francesca inspired his fresco “Saint Martin”. Among the Roman impressions was an unpleasant episode: a murder took place in their building, the police questioned Bauer, though he was never a suspect, and the trip had to be cut short.

Later he painted frescoes: in 1912 Vill-Vallareman for the house of the publisher Erik Åkerlund, and in 1913 “Saint Martin” for the Odd Fellows lodge in Nyköping. He made sketches for the competition to decorate the Stockholm Court House but did not dare to submit them. His last large work was the oil painting “Freja” for the assembly hall of a girls’ school in Karlskrona, in 1917; Ester posed for it. In 1914 the couple bought a house on Lake Bunn near Gränna, and in 1915 their son Bengt, known as Putte, was born. The painting “The Root Trolls” (1917) shows the sleeping Putte among roots. By 1917 there were difficulties in the marriage, and in 1918 he wrote his wife a letter with thoughts of divorce.

During his lifetime his work was shown in Gothenburg, Norrköping, Rome, Munich, Dresden, Brighton, Stockholm and Malmö; in 1915 he was awarded a medal of honour in San Francisco. Bauer, I think, valued himself lower than his viewers did: he regarded the praise for his trolls and princesses as “a nice pat on the head” for funny pictures for children, and he dreamed of painting “real art” in oil.

In November 1918 the family was preparing to move to a new home in Stockholm. Shortly before, a train accident near Getå, widely covered in the newspapers, had taken place, and Bauer chose the steamer Per Brahe. On 19 November the ship left Gränna carrying iron stoves, sewing machines and barrels; part of the cargo was left on deck. A storm began, the cargo shifted, and the steamer capsized and sank about 500 metres from the next landing. All 24 people on board died, among them John, Ester and Bengt. The wreck was found on 22 November at a depth of 32 metres and raised on 12 August 1922. The salvage drew about 20,000 spectators. On 18 August 1922 the family was buried at the Eastern Cemetery in Jönköping.