Göteborgs konstmuseum | Geskel Geskel Saloman

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Geskel Saloman
Danish-Swedish, 1821 - 1902

Geskel Saloman (before 1850 Geshel Salomon) was born in Tönder Slesvig, Denmark on April 1, 1821 and died on July 5, 1902 in Båstad, Sweden. His father was the merchant and clerk Isak Salomon, his mother was Feilchen Geskel. Geskel Saloman was the brother of the violinist and composer Siegfried Saloman and the grandfather of the actor Olga Raphael Hallencreutz.

Saloman grew up in Denmark and began his art studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1837. He attended the academy’s model school 1842–1846. He also worked in the academy professor Johan Ludvig Lund’s studio and was a private pupil of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg 1844–1845. Saloman sold a genre painting to the Copenhagen Art Society in 1846 and participated in an exhibition in Charlottenborg in 1847.

In 1850 Saloman moved to Gothenburg where he quickly entered social life and established himself as a portrait painter. In 1854 Saloman traveled to Paris where he studied in Thomas Couture’s studio until 1855. The same year he married Ida Göthilda Jacobson in the Mosaic congregation in Gothenburg.

Saloman was active in cultural life in Gothenburg. He participated with a self-portrait in the Gothenburg Art Association’s first exhibition in 1854. Under the association’s auspices, he showed the following year the painting News from the Crimean War (1855), which had previously been shown at the Paris Salon. Saloman was elected to the board of Gothenburg’s Art Association in 1856, where he proposed that the association collect art for a museum collection, which also happened.

Saloman undertook a study trip to Algeria in 1860–1861. The following year he founded a private drawing and painting school in Gothenburg. He was also involved in organizing Gothenburg’s museum drawing and painting school in the East Indian House. Saloman was superintendent of the school 1865–1870 but also a board member of the Slöjdföreningen’s school. He became a Swedish citizen in 1868. In 1872 Saloman moved to Stockholm where two years later he was appointed deputy professor at the Royal Academy of the Liberal Arts. He received a state portrait painter's salary the following year.

Although Saloman never traveled to Düsseldorf, he is counted among the Düsseldorf School, the dominant trend in Nordic art in the mid-19th century. It was made up of Nordic artists who trained in Düsseldorf and worked with romantic landscapes and anecdotal genre motifs. The style can be described as romantic and academic, as it followed academic conventions and rules. Landscapes were painted in the studio after careful study. Saloman worked above all in the portrait genre and carried out a number of high-profile commissions. He also painted self-portraits and genre motifs such as News from the Crimean War (1855), with a young girl reading a newspaper for a blind elderly man and Shoemaker reading (1870), both in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. He depicted folk life and interiors from a valley cabin in Dalarna County, later also Jewish holidays.

Saloman’s most famous painting is Emigrants on the Way to Gothenburg (1868–1872) in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, which depicts the wave of Swedish emigrants to North America.

Kristoffer Arvidsson

Works of Art