Alexander Roslin (1718 - 1793)

Nationality

Sweden

Place of Birth

Malmö, Sverige

Place of Death

Paris, Frankrike

Biography

Born in Malmö in 1718, Alexander Roslin became one of the foremost portrait painters of eighteenth-century Europe. His father was a doctor and when Alexander was born, he was stationed in Skåne in the post of “Gouvernements-Medicus”. Alexander Roslin is therefore often described as the “Son of Malmö” although the family originally came from Stockholm. He spent much of his life in Paris, he lived there until his death in 1793. As a young man, Roslin moved from Skåne to Karlskrona, Sweden’s naval base on the south coast, intending to work at the dockyards. However, he proved to be more skilled at drawing ships than building them, whereupon he moved to Stockholm and trained as an artist. Roslin was apprenticed to a master and developed his own unique style and skill in portraiture, which led to him embarking on a grand tour across Europe in the 1740s. His travels took him to Bavaria, Innsbruck, Venice, Naples and Rome, where he developed his portrait painting in a number of commissions for the monarchies and nobility of Europe. In 1752, he reached Paris, where he was well received by the French royal family in Versailles, and Paris came to be Roslin’s fixed point for the rest of his career. He became a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1753, where he met his wife-to-be, pastellist Marie-Suzanne Giroust. Alexander Roslin’s popularity as a portrait painter is said to have been due to his skill at depicting material in a highly realistic manner. The way in which he used light and shadow to replicate the texture and sheen of silk fabrics, lace collars and hairdos, and his ability to animate facial expressions and lustrous skin tones, all contributed to his fame, and the commissions reached higher by the years. Roslin is behind a number of well-known portraits such as “The Lady with the Veil”, held by Sweden’s Nationalmuseum representing his wife Marie-Suzanne, and the portrait of Carl Linnaeus which used to grace the hundred kronor note. Malmö Art Museum’s collections include Roslin’s self-portrait from 1790, his portrait of Russian Princess Natalia Petrovna Golitsyna, née Chernysheva, and her husband Prince Vladimir Borisovich Golitsyn, and the portrait of the French poet, writer, and satirist Alexis Piron, among others.