Born in a small town in Sweden, Erik Sääf spent much of his career living and painting in Paris. Immersed in a thriving Scandinavian artistic community, he established a reputation as a skilled painter of coastal and rural scenes, influenced by the French Naturalists of the Fin de siècle.
Erik Albin Anton Sääf was born on 16 February 1856 in Norrköping, a town south-west of Stockholm, one of eight children of Martin Samuel Anton Sääf and Maria Vilhelmina (neé Cimmerdahl). Erik Sääf began his artistic education at genre painter, Edvard Perséus’ painting school in Stockholm, before studying at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts from 1880 to 1884. In the summer of 1880, he spent time painting and studying with fellow academy artists in Mariefred, a lakeside town west of Stockholm.
After graduating from the Royal Swedish Academy, Sääf travelled, firstly to Denmark with his friend and fellow artist Edward Rosenberg, and later to Austria and Italy to continue his studies. In 1890, he moved to Paris, and would remain largely in France for the rest of his life, apart from regular summer visits back to Sweden.
In Paris, Sääf was an active and popular member of flourishing Scandinavian artistic community in the city, and was close friends with contemporaries such as Gustave Albert and Georg Arsenius. In his first few years in Paris, Sääf would send artworks back for exhibition in Sweden, but soon chose to focus exclusively on producing work for exhibition in Paris. He represented Sweden at the World Exhibitions in Paris in 1889 and 1900, and also exhibited at the Paris Salon.
Sometime after 1905, Erik Sääf married Jeanne Clémentine Étienne, the widow of his friend Gustave Albert. Sääf died on 17 February 1934 in the town of Gouvieux, in Oise, northern France. After his death, his widow helped to establish the ‘Erik Sääf Scholarship Fund’ in 1947 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts to support young Swedish landscape artists, particularly from the Östergötland region, who wished to study in France.
His work is represented in the collections of the Nationalmuseum (Stockholm), the Norrköping Art Museum, and the Swedish Club (Paris).
