Lennart Nilsson is one of Sweden’s best-known photographers. The summer exhibition 2022 at Gripsholm Castle, Mariefred, presented some twenty of his famous portraits of royalty, prominent cultural figures and politicians.
On 24 August 2022, it was 100 years since the birth of Lennart Nilsson, one of the best-known Swedish photographers both at home and abroad. He was born in Strängnäs, not far from Gripsholm. His works range from royal portraits to reportage photography of contemporary life to scientific images of the inside of the human body.
Lennart Nilsson began his career as a reportage photographer in the 1940s. Over the years, he worked for several of the big news magazines of the day, including the Swedish titles Se and Veckojournalen and the American Life. His work took him all over the world, from the Congo to the Arctic Ocean.
It was thanks to his background in reportage photography that Nilsson was chosen to take the first really close-up portrait of a Swedish monarch. Unlike the court photographers of the time, he had not been trained to keep a respectful distance from his illustrious model. Without being inconsiderate to his subject, the young photographer succeeded in producing a penetrating and fascinating portrait of Gustav V, in which the light and shadows serve to outline the elderly king’s face. Nilsson subsequently received further commissions from the royal court for official portraits for postage stamps and for more informal images of the royal family at work and leisure.
When the Swedish Institute presented the country to the world at large through the 1954 book Sweden in Profiles, they commissioned Nilsson to take portraits of prominent figures in the worlds of culture, science and business. He carried on with this type of work alongside reportage and a burgeoning interest in scientific photography. From the late 1950s onward, large group portraits became a new speciality. These included two assembled groups of Swedes born in the 1910s and the 1950s, who were photographed outside the then new Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
The National Portrait Gallery collection now includes over 50 works by Lennart Nilsson. For the Kings in Black and White exhibition at Gripsholm Castle in 2006, Nilsson donated seven portraits of Carl XVI Gustaf, his grandfather and his great-grandfather. Four years later, he followed up with a major donation of 45 portraits dating from the 1950s to the 1970s. Further individual works have since been donated or purchased.
An exhibition at Gripsholm in the summer 2022 presented a selection of about 20 of these portraits, mainly of royalty, prominent cultural figures and politicians. The exhibition coincided with the bicentenary of the National Portrait Gallery.