|
Professor Sigurður Nordal (1886 - 1974)
In 1946 Sigurjón Ólafsson was commissioned to do a portrait in bronze on the occasion of Sigurður Nordal's sixtieth birthday. After finishing this portrait, the artist decided to carve a version of it in dolerite, an Icelandic lava-based stone, which he had begun to use after his return to Iceland in 1945. During the war years he had completed the two large sculptures in granite for the square in front of Vejle town hall, which mark the beginning of a new period of stone sculptures in his oeuvre. The portrait of Sigurður Nordal is Ólafsson's first portrait in stone. It is symbolic in more than one way that Nordal, an important cultural figure and a philologist turned ambassador to Denmark at the time when the thorny issue of the Icelandic manuscripts was being settled, should have had his features carved in stone. Sculptor Sigurjón Ólafsson and his Portraits Sigurjón Ólafsson Museum 2008, ISBN 978-87-88755-05-03 |