Mosse Stoopendaal
Tåkern, Midsummers-day (A black-headed gull brooding at the nest with chicks), 24 June 1926
Watercolour on paper
27.5 x 45 cm (image size)
10 7/8 x 17 3/4 in (image size)
10 7/8 x 17 3/4 in (image size)
Copyright The Artist
Lake Tåkern (Östergötland) is one of Sweden’s most celebrated bird lakes: a broad, shallow wetland landscape of reedbeds, meadows, and open water that supports exceptionally rich wildlife. In late spring...
Lake Tåkern (Östergötland) is one of Sweden’s most celebrated bird lakes: a broad, shallow wetland landscape of reedbeds, meadows, and open water that supports exceptionally rich wildlife. In late spring and early summer it is especially renowned for nesting and feeding waterbirds, making it a classic setting for Swedish wildlife observation and painting.
In the present watercolour W. J. "Mosse" Stoopeendaal has captured a black-headed gull brooding at the nest with chicks at the lake.
Born near Stockholm, Mosse lived briefly as a young boy in Ytterjärna, a village in Södermanland nestled in notable natural beauty. The area evidently remained an early point of reference for him; Bruno Liljefors - Sweden’s most celebrated painter of wild animals - was similarly drawn to the region and later built a house there. Yet the paths of Mosse and Liljefors never truly crossed. Liljefors enjoyed the advantages of academic training and a vast commercial career propelled by commissions. Mosse, by contrast, was largely self-taught, and even his basic schooling was irregular. His ambition was not the grand production of an atelier, but the patient pursuit of fleeting, undisturbed moments in the wild—those charged instants between animals in which we recognise our own human situations and experience.
In 1908 the Stoopendaal family settled in Härryda, a rural hamlet just outside Gothenburg. It was in this landscape—defined by dense woodland, hundreds of lakes, and proximity to the west coast—that Vilhelm Jacob Stoopendaal (1901–1948), known from early on as “Mosse,” developed his personal, impressionistic approach to wildlife painting. While he absorbed technical fundamentals from his father, the accomplished illustrator and painter Georg Stoopendaal, Mosse’s sensibility was shaped above all by direct, sustained observation of nature.
Remarkably, Georg Stoopendaal was Mosse’s sole artistic teacher. Georg had emigrated to the United States in 1892, working as a portraitist and illustrator, and he was also sent by a New York newspaper to document late-1890s conflict in the Caribbean, producing vivid reportage drawings. He became especially known for illustrations of North American Indigenous peoples. After returning to Sweden in 1898, he married the young painter Helena Josefina Janzon, and their son Vilhelm— “Mosse”—was born in 1901. Georg continued a prolific career as an illustrator for magazines and publishers of historical works, and collaborated on numerous commissions with his celebrated sister-in-law Jenny Nyström.
Mosse’s lifelong study of the abundant wildlife of south-western Scandinavia grew out of this family environment—artistically rigorous, visually literate, and intimately connected to hunting and the outdoors. During his short life he continued to undertake commissioned work with his father, while also maintaining a studio in central Gothenburg, which he kept until his untimely death in 1948. Like Georg - and like Liljefors - Mosse was a hunter, and therefore in almost uninterrupted contact with nature. Yet his paintings, often of more reclusive animals, suggest that what he truly hunted was an unspoiled vision: the quiet dignity of each creature within its own environment.
His swift, accurate watercolours and sketches are intimate testaments to a keen eye, and they frequently served as the foundation for larger studio canvases. Rather than the photorealist, staged arrangements favoured by many wildlife painters, Stoopendaal sought vivid impressions of nature—brushwork alive to movement, surfaces imbued with atmosphere, and colour used to convey the sensation of being actually there.
In the present watercolour W. J. "Mosse" Stoopeendaal has captured a black-headed gull brooding at the nest with chicks at the lake.
Born near Stockholm, Mosse lived briefly as a young boy in Ytterjärna, a village in Södermanland nestled in notable natural beauty. The area evidently remained an early point of reference for him; Bruno Liljefors - Sweden’s most celebrated painter of wild animals - was similarly drawn to the region and later built a house there. Yet the paths of Mosse and Liljefors never truly crossed. Liljefors enjoyed the advantages of academic training and a vast commercial career propelled by commissions. Mosse, by contrast, was largely self-taught, and even his basic schooling was irregular. His ambition was not the grand production of an atelier, but the patient pursuit of fleeting, undisturbed moments in the wild—those charged instants between animals in which we recognise our own human situations and experience.
In 1908 the Stoopendaal family settled in Härryda, a rural hamlet just outside Gothenburg. It was in this landscape—defined by dense woodland, hundreds of lakes, and proximity to the west coast—that Vilhelm Jacob Stoopendaal (1901–1948), known from early on as “Mosse,” developed his personal, impressionistic approach to wildlife painting. While he absorbed technical fundamentals from his father, the accomplished illustrator and painter Georg Stoopendaal, Mosse’s sensibility was shaped above all by direct, sustained observation of nature.
Remarkably, Georg Stoopendaal was Mosse’s sole artistic teacher. Georg had emigrated to the United States in 1892, working as a portraitist and illustrator, and he was also sent by a New York newspaper to document late-1890s conflict in the Caribbean, producing vivid reportage drawings. He became especially known for illustrations of North American Indigenous peoples. After returning to Sweden in 1898, he married the young painter Helena Josefina Janzon, and their son Vilhelm— “Mosse”—was born in 1901. Georg continued a prolific career as an illustrator for magazines and publishers of historical works, and collaborated on numerous commissions with his celebrated sister-in-law Jenny Nyström.
Mosse’s lifelong study of the abundant wildlife of south-western Scandinavia grew out of this family environment—artistically rigorous, visually literate, and intimately connected to hunting and the outdoors. During his short life he continued to undertake commissioned work with his father, while also maintaining a studio in central Gothenburg, which he kept until his untimely death in 1948. Like Georg - and like Liljefors - Mosse was a hunter, and therefore in almost uninterrupted contact with nature. Yet his paintings, often of more reclusive animals, suggest that what he truly hunted was an unspoiled vision: the quiet dignity of each creature within its own environment.
His swift, accurate watercolours and sketches are intimate testaments to a keen eye, and they frequently served as the foundation for larger studio canvases. Rather than the photorealist, staged arrangements favoured by many wildlife painters, Stoopendaal sought vivid impressions of nature—brushwork alive to movement, surfaces imbued with atmosphere, and colour used to convey the sensation of being actually there.