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Painter Þorvaldur Skúlason (1906 - 1984)
Þorvaldur Skúlason grew up in the North of Iceland, where his father was a shopkeeper and commercial agent. He lost his father at the age of nine and at the age of fourteen he went to sea as cabin boy on the Icelandic liner Gullfoss, which carried both freight and passengers between Reykjavík, Leith and Copenhagen. At that time Skúlason had thoughts of becoming either a captain or first officer on a ship, but one time, as a bedridden patient he began to draw and by 1924, when he arrived in Reykjavík, his fate was sealed. He sought lessons from painter Ásgrímur Jónsson, who at one was also Sigurjón Ólafsson's teacher. The two aspiring artists met again in Denmark in 1933, where Þorvaldur Skúlason lived until 1938, when he left for France for a long sojourn with his Danish wife, Astrid Fugmann. Ólafsson and Skúlason were close friends for the remainder of their lives. Both of them are considered among Iceland's most outstanding representatives of Modernism. The largest collection of Skúlason's paintings belongs to the University of Iceland's Art Collection. Sculptor Sigurjón Ólafsson and his Portraits Sigurjón Ólafsson Museum 2008, ISBN 978-87-88755-05-03 |