This is the logo of Kringvarp, the islands’ radio station. In Faroese, kringvarp means ‘to cast in all directions’. This is exactly for what we came: spread word of this project across the eighteen islands.

I meet Solveig on the parking lot. Earlier that week, she reached out to Gunnar from the station. “He’ll have us on Summarmorgun (‘Summer Morning’) on Wednesday”, she said with excitement right after the call.

Latin vibes fill the studio we enter that Wednesday morning. Los Ángeles Azules are still playing – the football season is in full swing on the Faroes. The hosts Gunnar and Ingi weave a transition from the World Cup to the early chapters of the islands’ art history.

Solveig speaks first. As director of the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, she introduces the project in the national language, also touching on the inspirational role Gislander played on the most famous artist of the islands.

Then, I take over. The hosts do a great job to create a relaxed atmosphere. There is plenty of room to speak about the project and the mission on the islands, which is connecting with the people whose help this project depends on.

Listen to the Contribution (39:36ff)

Solveig takes over again and wraps up in Faroese, inviting listeners to help solve this hundred-piece research puzzle and to attend Sunday’s talk. We thank the hosts for the conversation and the opportunity to speak on air, and Gunnar leads over to the next song.

The red light on the microphones goes off. Then, Ingi turns to me.

“You know, my grandmother – she has a Gislander painting in her cottage,” he says. “It’s a likka – I don’t know the bird in English.1 But she really, really loves it.”

If you cast something into the air on the islands, you might be surprised where it lands.

This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

References

“”Far out in a radiant ocean glinting like quicksilver there lies a solitary little lead-coloured land. The tiny rocky shore is to the vast ocean just about the same as a grain of sand to the floor of a dance hall. But seen beneath a magnifying glass, this grain of sand is nevertheless a whole world with mountains and valleys, sounds and fjords and houses with small people.”

William Heinesen, The Lost Musicians1

The opening lines by the novelist William Heinesen cross my mind as the main island comes into sight. It is two hours to midnight and the sun is just about to sink into the clouds above the largest of the Faroe Islands.

From my backpack I take a pair of opera glasses that have travelled with me since my years in Italy. Instead of the frescoes high up in church naves, I trace the southern side of Nólsoy, its contours stacked into a silhouette softened by mist and distance, resting upon a sheet of pewter water.

Heinesen, Blake, Gislander – a train of thought shuttles between a triumvirate sharing the same first name as we enter the Fjord of Nólsoy, until it derails by the loudspeaker’s crackle:

Disembarkment at Tórshavn in one hour.

Sunday, 23:30

I remember your face from the museum website …

Zacharias Heinesen walks down the path from his house. The artist is in his nineties, and recently Listasavn – the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands – celebrated him with an exhibition.

It is late and only briefly, I hint at my work to retrace the footsteps of the Swedish painter William Gislander. “Yes, I still paint,” Zacharias tells me as he hands over the key.

“Let’s talk more during the week”, he says as he ascends the slope again where his home and atelier lie.

Key in hand, I stand in front of the stairs to the house where I had pushed my bike up from the harbour. The sidings are painted red, in a brighter tone than the Swedish cousins. The roof and the doors, the railings and window frames – they shine as turquoise highlights on the chili ground.

His father William built the house in the 1930s. Today, the Heinesen family maintains it as a museum in his honour, offering the top floor as a residence to artists and writers.

From the bathroom window upstairs, I spot a first glimpse of a landscape from the paintings I came to study. Past the floodlights of the football pitch, I see the headlands of Eystnes protruding across a horizon painted by dusk.

Through the turquoise window grids of the living room, I spot another motif. The ridge of Nólsoy, the background of several Gislander paintings. As my gaze wanders across its outline, I think of the famous illustration by Saint-Exupery, the elephant swallowed inside a boa constrictor.

A seagull lands on the streetlight in front of me. Briefly, our eyes lock, before the midnight visitor departs again, across the treetops of the municipal park, into a night that knows no dark.

Monday, 7:53

I return to the window, sleeping mask still in hand.

Last rags of mist are dissolving Nólsoy. With it disappears yesterday’s association. The ridge now stands sharp against the morning sky, its structure laid bare.

The ship on which I came is out on the sea again, leaving behind a void in the harbour basin.

Until the kettle boils, I watch the wind play in the tree tops of Tórshavn.

Monday, 10:02

Plantasjan is one of the names by which the Faroese call the park – ‘the Plantation’.

The stroll from my residence towards the National Gallery winds along trees brought together from across the world. Above the old town, they form the only forest on eighteen treeless islands.

Among them thrive varieties of Nothofagus that were transplanted here half a century ago, by a Danish expedition sent out to Tierra del Fuego – the same place where my trace towards Sámal Joensen Mikines and William Gislander begins.

Monday, 11:16

The first painting I see at Listasavn is a breaking wave.

Through the door to the exhibition space, I see the turquoise of a bulging barrel of water pierce through the glass in its glacial shade.

It is another version of a work that I had seen a month before, when I visited the Mikines family in Copenhagen. Eirikur and Birgir made me spot the same wave in a number of paintings that I showed them by Gislander.

As it turned out, he, too, had painted the waters breaking at the landing site of Mykines – from the same spot which later also Sámal Joensen-Mikines sought out to paint.

Monday, 13:09

From the first meeting with my new colleagues, Anna Maria and Solveig, I leave with an A4 page full of notes, straight into the exhibition.

Through the glass door, I spot Solveig again in the lobby. I wave her over, eager to share what I had learned about the wave at Mykines the month before.

I find her alive to the story of the waves by Gislander; of his marine views that inspired the early motifs of Joensen-Mikines, too. From the wall next to the painting she picks a smaller frame. It is the earliest one by Joensen-Mikines in the room, a coastal view from Vágar.

Carefully, Solveig turns it around to reveal the back of the painted surface.

The sides of tea boxes, the owners who donated this work to Listasavn still knew.

Having just entered the exhibition space, I already feel one step closer to the years when the young Sámal Joensen-Mikines had just met the Swede William Gislander on Mykines, and to that summer in 1924 when he scraped rests from metal tubes and began to paint on pieces of scrap wood he could find in the village.

One room. Two paintings. The first twelve hours.

The journey had just begun.

This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

References

This Sunday, I have the pleasure to speak at Listasavn Føroya in Tórshavn about the Swedish painter William Gislander (1890–1937) and his seminal journey to the Faroe Islands in 1924.

During a nine-month stay, Gislander produced around one hundred paintings of Faroese landscapes and wildlife, and inspired the eighteen-year old Sámal Joensen-Mikines to become a painter. The exhibition that followed in Copenhagen later that year became the first major art exhibition dedicated entirely to the Faroe Islands.

• Date: Sunday, 28 June 2026, 15:00

• Location: Listasavn Føroya, Tórshavn

The talk will be in English language and introduce this research project that seeks to reconstruct this forgotten exhibition and trace the surviving paintings. The majority of them disappeared from public view into private collections a century ago. More than 22 of them were already sold on the Faroes (and are presumably still there).

If you are curious to learn about a new chapter in the history of Nordic art, or may even know of a Gislander painting from this time, I am looking forward to seeing you in person on Sunday!

This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

“We call it the Angry Seal.”

Karin nodded towards the living room, to the painting placed on a chest of drawers.

Surf washed over a skerry, its foaming crests collecting beneath in streaks of impasto white. Above it rested a seal, its expression almost confrontational; canine teeth sticking out from the lower jaw.

Little about the seal’s presence felt endearing. Yet the very species was the reason the painting had found its way into this flat in Lund.

I had travelled south to visit Thomas and Karin after an auction house put us in contact. A few years earlier, Thomas had acquired the painting whose record I had found online. It appeared to date from William Gislander’s stay on the Faroe Islands in 1924.

The flat I entered smelled of warm cookies. Books lined the walls in the hallway. Among the titles, I spotted some German-language volumes on spectroscopy. He had once worked in academia, Thomas had told me on the way from the station.

“Physics is still my passion,” he said. “Physics and music.”

Past a DJ deck and a mixing console we entered the domain of the Angry Seal.

“We have always liked seals,” Thomas explained. “I think that’s why I bought it in the first place.”

His purchase, however, had not entirely been a success.

“It turned out Karin was not very happy about having the seal in the flat.”

“Its facial expression is somewhat … unusual,” Karin replied.

“It ended up in the basement.”

Endangered Species

For the occasion of my visit, the seal had been granted temporary release from the vaults.

Looking more closely, I noticed details that seemed unfinished. The right foreflipper appeared sketchier than the rest of the composition. The face, by contrast, had been painted with remarkable attention.

I opened my laptop and showed Karin and Thomas another painting by Gislander I had located during my research. It depicted three seals resting on wave-washed skerries.

Towering above them, the ‘Angry Seal’.

“Perhaps your painting was an early study,” I suggested. “Gislander later returned to the motif and developed it into this larger composition.”

Thomas and Karin leaned closer to compare the two images.

“But there may be a further explanation for its expressive traits,” I continued.

“In an interview from 1924, Gislander speaks about the seals he encountered on Mykines. To put it mildly, he was not particularly fond of them.”

Two pairs of eyebrows rose simultaneously.

I pointed to an interview with William Gislander I had read in Copenhagen the days before. As the painter stated, the seals he observed were wasteful eaters. They tore open the fish, consumed the liver and entrails, and left the rest behind.

He believed they caused serious damage to the local fisheries, prompting a rather radical comment:

“I’d take greatest delight in sending a bullet through their bodies when I saw their terrible gluttony – but you can’t paint and shoot seals at the same time.” 1

The room fell silent. I looked into four shocked eyes.

A few weeks later, Thomas sent me a photograph.

The ‘Angry Seal’ had been released from the basement, he wrote. It had been granted a prominent place upstairs now, in the walk-in-closet.

Further Readings and References

Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to Thomas Lennartson and Karin Weidenholm for their warm reception and ‘bra sälskap’ in Lund.

A Swedish painter, a Danish dentist, and a Faroese captain board a ship. What sounds like the beginning of a joke was, in fact, a scene that played out one Sunday morning in 1924, in the harbour of Tórshavn.

Clad in raincoats, wellies, and sou’westers, five sportsmen set out into a rough sea with a crew of three Faroese seamen. Their destination was Mykines, the westernmost island of the Faroe Islands.

As the boat entered the current between Nólsoy and Streymoy, the artist took position at the bow. Instead of a brush he carried a rifle.

Knud Johannes Rohmann had joined the Swedish painter-hunter that day as he attempted to cross over to Mykines. Unlike Gislander, he had not come to the Faroes to paint birds, cliffs, or storm-torn seas: Rohmann had come to pull teeth.

I first encountered the Danish dentist through the provenance of a work by Gislander – a painting of Eider ducks that Rohmann had purchased while still on the islands. It was the first Gislander work whose trail I followed into a private collection.

Only later did I discover that Rohmann left behind more than the painting: a series of letters printed in Danish newspapers – some of them tracing journeys alongside the Swedish painter.

Gloomy Outlooks

“The first impression one gets of the town – and of the country, as well – is rather bleak.” 1

On 23 April, the first letter by Rohmann appeared in Silkeborg Avis, the newspaper of his home region. At the time he wrote it, on 8 April 1924, the dentist had left his home in Kjellerup behind already for a few weeks. From the middle of March onward, local newspapers advertised his services in Tórshavn:

K.J. Rohmann, modern and painless treatment.2

In the opening lines of his first letter from the Faroes, Rohmann paints a disenchanting picture of the islands. He disembarked in a harbour assailed by the elements, protected by little more than the ridge of Nólsoy on the other side. Smoke belches from the ships whose engines remain on stand-by in the harbour, always ready to escape another onslaught of rain and gales that loom over the islands.

The houses spread out irregularly in the historical part of the town, Rohmann writes, home to some 2,500 inhabitants. The hygienic conditions the dentist found appalling: open channels, he complained, flush black water into the sea. Chickens and ducks wander randomly in the streets. Often, those who return late at night even stumble over flocks of sheep.

In the upper part of the town, he concedes, there is at least electricity. Yet much on the islands is still behind. In total, there are only two or three cars on the islands. Anywhere outside of the city, their services are useless, in a landscape that has neither roads nor trees.

South Along Cliffs and Caves

It was a harsh environment to which K. J. Rohmann arrived in early 1924, bringing dental services to the seventeen islands in the North Atlantic. Yet the harsh environment held space for adventures, too.

In early May, Rohmann sent a further letter to Denmark. In the text entitled “Around the Faroes in Fog and Storm”, he describes the break-neck boat tour he undertook “with the lads” to Mykines.3

The lads, as he continues, are a crew of three Faroese seamen that the artist Gislander had gathered around him – a painter who had taken up residence in this “Eldorado of birds” to depict them in these landscapes.

Rohmann lets his acquaintance and travel companion appear in flattering light: he is a member of the Swedish Academy, the dentist praises, has exhibited at Charlottenborg, and will show the magnificent paintings from his stay in an exhibition at Copenhagen, together with the artist Ring.

While Rohmann overstates the painter’s actual merits,4 it seems he took pride in being invited together with four other ‘sportsmen’ as companion for the boat trip. To cross over to Mykines, he writes, Gislander had chosen the fourth of May, to reach the island before the great migrations of birds set in.

We do not know whether Gislander drew or painted on the boat trip Rohmann describes. However, motifs in paintings by him known so far relate to sceneries and encounters with wildlife as the dentist described them in the letter tracing the route to Mykines.

Having passed the peninsula at Glyvursnes, their boat continued skimming along the coastline. Surf splashed against the cliffs in white foam, revealing magnificent shades of green in the sea. Travelling south, the crew passed the caves accessible only from the seaside.

Inside, rays of mist-dimmed sun elicited colours of all kinds in the waves that struck the rocks with deafening noise.5 Nearby the caves lie the breeding places of the seals, Rohmann writes. Above, on inaccessible ledges, reside black cormorants – birds that, as he points out, always hunt in pairs.

Several of such pairs appear in paintings by Gislander. In one of them, a pair floats on crests of translucent green as the waves surge into a cave (see above).

A further pair is seen overlooking the sea from a skerry (see no. 20 in the Search List), while another appears floating on the sea as mist reveals the silhouette of Hestur – the view that opened after rounding Kirkebønæs.

On the cliffs above this southernmost tip of the main island, Rohmann writes, they spotted the black cormorants again.

Eventually, one of them succumbed to the drumfire opened by the riflemen at the bow (perhaps, it later served as a model in the atelier at Tórshavn where Gislander carried out his works?).

Veðurføst

Passing by the islands of Hestur and Koltur, the boat set course towards the west.

On the horizon, rugged tops emerged from a storm-tossed sea; the tip of a gigantic mountain whose base continues deep beneath the sea. The island of Mykines came into sight.

Eventually, however, the elements won. Facing towering waves and storms, the sailors advised to abort the crossing.

There is a Faroese word for this condition of island life: veðurføst – “stuck by weather”. Sailing into the fjord of Sørvágur, the boat found shelter among the steep cliffs.

Here, on the island of Vágar, the ‘lads’ dropped off Gislander. The crew decided to round the island and return to Tórshavn, where their adventure became the talk of the town.

Weather conditions brought William Gislander an unexpected sojourn on Vágar. With the next post boat, Rohmann writes, the artist would continue his journey to Mykines.

Yet this stay, even if forced, would not be to his disadvantage, the dentist assured his readers: “Magnificent works Gislander will paint here” – with that thought, their paths parted.

Pulling Teeth on Mykines

In a month’s time, Rohmann writes still in the same letter, he would attempt the crossing to Mykines again.

The next time, weather conditions did not bar the dentist from reaching the island. On 29 May 1924, as Rohmann writes in another letter, he disembarked at the landing site below the village.6

In deep awe, he had made the final approach to Mykines: the force of the waves lashing its perpendicular cliffs, the innumerable birds nesting there each year, the verdant grass that covered the island at this time of the year.

Of the 137 people living on Mykines, Rohmann writes, no fewer than sixteen pain-ridden villagers rejoiced at the sight of his extraction forceps.

Here, the dentist reunited with William Gislander. The artist had already spent some time on the island since he crossed over from Vágar, and as Rohmann writes, “has painted magnificent paintings from this place”.7

Together with the painter, Rohmann went on an excursion to the westernmost tongue of land on Mykineshólmur. Puffins scurried near the bird cliffs they passed. From one of their holes, Gislander pulled out one of these avian fellows in its monastic habit (an early pictorial study of these birds today is kept by the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands).

At the utmost tip of the island, they reached the colony of gannets. Beneath the cries of these birds and the sound of their wingtips cutting the air, they listened to the lore the villagers told of the ‘King of the Gannets’ – the castaway albatross from the southern hemisphere that joined these birds half a century before.

The Hidden Camera

Two further letters exist by the travelling dentist, printed back in Silkeborg in 1924. One of them describes a hiking excursion with four others that he undertook in the mountains north-west of Tórshavn. In the last of the letters that Rohmann sent in June, he continued his “dentist tour” to Suðuroy, the southernmost of the islands.8

Yet it seems there was more material from his stay on the Faroes than these articles.

“I have enclosed photos of the drying places and the work of the fishermen,” Rohmann wrote that summer from Suðuroy.

This detail connects with hints he left in other letters: among the luggage for his hiking tour near Tórshavn, Rohmann mentioned not only the lunch packs, but also cameras.9 And after weather had forced him to abort the crossing to Mykines in early May, the dentist concluded:

”In about a month, we’ll make the same trip again and hope for fair wind and sunshine, so that the camera will be usable.” 10

Did Rohmann leave behind a trail of forgotten photographs from the Faroes?

Let that be material for another story.

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Further Readings and References

All translations are my own unless stated otherwise.

For his support of my archival studies I am grateful to Christoph Klinger.

“Let’s have a look, shall we?”

I followed Hans into his living room. On its wall, a painting opened a window onto the North Atlantic: Eider ducks on a blue-green sea, with the island of Hestur rising in the distance.

“Gislander must have painted this in early summer,” Hans explained. “It’s a female Eider duck,” he continued, pointing to the middle of the painting.

“They breed on land, up in the fjäll,” he continued. “In May, they leave for the journey to the water. That walk, it’s pretty dangerous for the young. They usually lose some ducklings on the way down.”

“The three you can see here are the ones who made it.”

I stepped closer, studying their silhouettes in the water, the reflections beneath, the brush strokes that form the waves.

“There is quite a difference between the paintings by Gislander that I have seen so far,” I said. “How he paints waves. The accuracy he gives to the birds. There’s quite a development across his works from 1924.”

On the screen of my laptop, I shared a few of the reproductions with Hans that I had found so far, together with photographs of paintings I had just seen in the Danish Parliament.

Maybe he was in a bit of a hurry here, we both agreed.

Childhood View with Ducks

I moved back a little again for an overall impression. The colour of the sea shone clearly – differently. Only later did I understand the layers of history this painting carried before it reached this wall.

I had first seen it in a photograph online: the same ducks, the same island, hanging above a dark sofa. During an early search for William Gislander, I found the painting offered for sale only a few months before.

“The painting belonged to my mother,” Lisbet replied to my message. Her mother remembered that it was first brought to Denmark by a Danish dentist.

The dentist worked in the Faroe Islands in 1924, Lisbet continued, at the same time as Gislander. He later lived next door to her great-grandparents, she added. They received the painting from him.

Lisbet was kind enough to forward a contact request to the buyer of the painting.

A week later, I stepped out of a commuter train out of Copenhagen. It was the weeks before Christmas, and beneath a grey sky I followed the narrow bike track snaking between single-storey houses, towards the address Hans had sent me.

We shared a coffee in the kitchen. Hans told me he worked from home, and the kids were at school. In the pauses of our conversation, I listened to the morning quiet of Danish suburbia.

They had moved in recently, Hans told me over coffee. Lisbet had written how happy her mother had been that the painting found a new home – with a family from the Faroes.

“Indeed, I did grow up there,” Hans confirmed. He came from the island west of the main island, from the town of Midvagur. He missed the nature, Hans said. The long walks with the dog, across the ever-changing nature of the islands.

The one on the painting – Hestur – it was the island he saw from his childhood room.

“That’s why I bought the painting, for our place here in Denmark,” he smiled.

“It’s the same ridge – only seen from the other side.”

The Dentist’s Trail

“You know more about the dentist,” I said, “you know, the one who brought the painting back to Denmark?”

“Yeah … I think I read that he was adopted into a Danish family,” Hans said, looking for some records he had followed online before. “They later had the flat above Lisbet’s grandmother’s place. Strong smokers; I had the painting cleaned.”

“There’s this letter I found in the newspapers a few days ago,” I said, “from a dentist who travelled around the islands in 1924. Rohmann I think was his name.”

“Yes, exactly! Rohmann. That’s him.”

Through Rohmann, the Eider ducks had found their way from the Faroe Islands to Denmark. But the dentist had left more than a painting behind.

In May 1924, he had written to his local newspaper from the islands in the Atlantic, mentioning here for the first time “a Swedish painter, Mr. Gislander,” who had taken up residence in what Rohmann called “the Eldorado of birds.”1

Looking at the Eider ducks on Hans’s wall, I saw two trails crossing.

Here was the travelling object, painted by Gislander in the early summer of 1924, which, like the ducklings, had eventually found another Faroese home. And there were the letters the dentist had sent from his journeys on the islands – documents in which new parts of Gislander’s travels across the Faroes were waiting to be discovered.

Further Readings and References

Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to Hans Bogi Ellefsen and Lisbet Krøll for their support of my research.

Two columns rise at the edge of the sea, in the storm-lashed North Atlantic. Each year, on the verge of spring, they give bearing to migrating birds – gannets that return to the westernmost tip of the Faroe Islands, to build nests and lay blue-sheened eggs.

For several months, black-tipped wings edge a cloud of white bodies spiralling above the rocks, dissolving again each September as the birds depart for the sea.

A traveler from the other end of the world first made these columns emerge on my map: an albatross that crossed the Equator 160 years ago, coming to live on these rocks as an exile from home.

Bred on the southernmost rock of Patagonia, the story goes, the Black-browed Albatross logged a journey of some 10,000 miles – on a route nobody knows exactly – before it reached this last land in the sea.

Each autumn, when the gannets moved out to the sea, it followed on their migrations. And at the verge of each spring, for three decades and more, it returned with the birds to their rocks where the Faroes fray out.1

The first time I saw the two columns was in the work of an artist.

In 1906, a boy was born on the outermost of the Faroe Islands. Unlike most of the men in its village of 100 people, he would become neither a fisherman nor one of the bird-catchers who dangle on horse hair ropes from the cliffs and reach for the gannets at night – so much seemed clear as Sámal grew up.

At the age of twenty-two, he left the Faroes behind and crossed over the sea to study art in Copenhagen, as first from the islands. The village and its people the artist carried within. For a decade, they returned on his canvasses in shades of dark; echoes from the island he made part of his name.

Sámal Joensen-Mikines became the most famous painter from the Faroe Islands. Throughout a life torn between life in the city and the island where he was born, he would return to Mykines; would seek out the storm-tossed cliffs facing the sea.

On many of these walks, he would bring his easel and place it overlooking the two columns, as he had done dozens of times before.

Over decades, Sámal followed the cries of the birds out to the last land. With the strokes of his brush, he made the rocks and the gannets that circle above appear on his canvas, again and again.

Like the migrating birds, he returned to the columns, on the same path on which he had led an artist in the summer of 1924 – the year he met the painter who changed the course of his life.

The Summer of 1924

In May 1924, a Swedish artist disembarked from the post boat at Mykines.

Several times, he had tried to cross over to the storm-lashed island in the sea, making haste to arrive on time before the main migrations of birds set in.

For several weeks, the Swede took up residence in a house owned by a local merchant – the brother of Sámal’s mother. Across the shores of the island, the painter scouted for vantage points high up the cliffs that drop several hundreds of metres deep, where the seals play in the surf beneath.

On some of these days, the Joensen boy followed him out in the field. Sámal guided the Swede to places known to the island’s catchers of birds, to ledges in the cliffs where the puffins scurried, barely enough to place an easel.

The cries of birds circling above pierced through the roar of the surf as he watched the artist squeeze paint from metal tubes onto a wooden board. With his brush, he mixed their shades to thick paste and in rapid strokes made the ocean emerge, and the endless colours in which the sun played on the rocks of the island that Sámal called home.

They were few on Mykines, and even fewer was the number of those who spoke openly. Yet by the summer when the Swede disembarked, many in the village had already written Sámal off as a failure.

All this began to change in those weeks when the boy of eighteen years encountered the painter from Sweden. “His glowing canvases”, Sámal later told his biographer, “ignited me with renewed force of life”.2

More than twenty works the Swede painted that summer alone on Mykines. Throughout his stay on the island, Sámal assisted the artist, carrying easel and painter box and leading him to ever new vantage points.

On some of their outings, Sámal picked up metal tubes the Swede had dropped on the ground. Cadmiumgult. Marsviolet. Caput Mortuum.

Scraping their rests, he took first steps painting on cardboard and plywood that he gathered back in the village – views of shores and seasides, as he had watched the Swede create them on canvas.

Overcoming shyness, he showed him his works. And throughout his life, he would never forget the words he spoke to him in thick Skåne accent – words that encouraged him to pursue the path of an artist.

Genesis of a Bird Painter

Three years later, Sámal had his first exhibition on the islands – the one that won him the ticket to study art in Copenhagen.

The Swedish painter who left his mark on the Joensen boy that summer is a footnote to the opening chapters in the biographies celebrating the greatest of Faroese artists.3

By the time he first set foot on Mykines, William Gislander had already been in the Faroes for almost half a year. When he left from the islands again in mid-September 1924, more than eighty paintings followed him on the steamer south.

Gislander’s importance lies less in a single masterpiece than in an event. In 1924, he gathered the Faroes – their cliffs and storms, the animals on land and in the sea and the birds in the sky above – into a body of images large enough to unfold a panorama of the islands in the Atlantic.

For a few weeks in Copenhagen, they appeared neither as a stopover nor as a distant dependency, but as a world in their own right. The exhibition they furnished still the same month was the first to give a blank in the mainland imagination scale and visibility.

A century later, this panorama of the Faroes survives only in fragments.

To this day, there is no article dedicated to William Gislander’s life and work. Of the roughly 100 paintings he produced on the Faroe Islands, around 95% have remained invisible in private possession.

Newspaper clips and memories passed on in the family are the main sources to trace the path that led this artist from his home in Southern Sweden to the islands in the North Atlantic.4

By the time William Gislander reached Mykines in May 1924, he was not an unknown painter. In southern Sweden and Copenhagen, the student of Nils Forsberg had made a name for himself in the 1910s as a painter of birds and coastal landscapes around the seabaths of Falsterbo – geese over marshes, swans on shallow waters, ducks lifting from the flats of Skåne.

Yet by the 1920s, the same motifs that had made him recognisable and provided a modest living were beginning to narrow around him. Critics admired Gislander’s knowledge of birds. Yet as his output increased, they also sensed repetition.

Newspapers referred to Gislander as the “goose painter” from Skåne, occasionally even teased as Gåslander (sv. gås = goose).

The Faroes offered a way out. Here was a landscape almost unseen in mainland art: dramatic cliffs, winter storms, midsummer nights, bird mountains, flocks of migrating birds, and colours unlike anything on the southern Swedish coast.

For a painter whose art revolved around landscapes and birds, the islands loomed large. According to Gislander’s later account, it was the zoologist and explorer Axel Klinckowström who first placed the Faroe Islands on his map.

Klinckowström knew parts of the islands from earlier scientific journeys and belonged to the elite circles regularly residing in the Falsterbo area where Gislander lived. With his suggestion, the pressure to expand his palette finally gained a direction.

In 1923, the painter geared up for a nine-month trip to the Faroes, leaving his wife Eva and his boy Stig behind, a few weeks before he turned four. On the Feast of Epiphany in January 1924, William Gislander embarked at Copenhagen on the steamer Sleipner instead, bound for the Faroes – on a journey that would make the islands visible in art.

Motif Hunting on the Faroes

In mid-January 1924, William Gislander first lay sight on the Faroes as their snow-capped peaks emerged on the horizon.

For nine months to come, he travelled their length and breadth by foot and by boat, exploring the shifts of light and colours and the fauna across the islands. From metre-thick snow and cold that made the paint on his palette freeze, conditions changed to summers filled with crystal air and never-ending light.

Across all of them, Gislander observed the birds and their migrations, capturing them not only with the brush but with the rifle, as well.

Close to a hundred paintings resulted from Gislander’s stay on the Faroe Islands.

Around the Feast of Ólavsøka at the end of July, more than half of them were on display in Tórshavn. Roughly two dozen were sold still on the islands.

In the second half of September 1924, Gislander embarked for Copenhagen again. At the end of the month, his paintings from the Faroes were planned to be shown at Den Frie Udstilling.

Seven years after he had last exhibited in this gallery, he returned with motifs that next to no one had seen on the mainland before.

The Copenhagen Exhibition

On 27th September 1924, the doors opened to the vernissage of the first exhibition ever dedicated to the Faroes outside the islands.

Across more than three weeks – the exhibition was prolonged due to great demand – more than 5000 visitors saw Gislander’s paintings from the Faroes.

Newspapers in Denmark, Sweden, and also the islands reported on the event at Den Frie. Journalists flocked around the artist with sea-blue eyes and shining blond hair, newly returned from the islands.

Visitors to the exhibition included the highest echelons of Danish society. Among them were Prince Knud, a hunting friend of Gislander’s.

On the afternoon of the 17th of October, his father King Christian X personally attended Den Frie, conversed with artist, and left with a painting of the islands he had visited on the way to Greenland in 1921.

Reviews of Gislander’s exhibition were overwhelmingly positive.

Critics who had followed the painter’s trajectory acknowledged the positive effect the Atlantic sojourn had exerted on his art. Finally, different birds, in a dramatic nature! The landscapes of the Faroes, so reviewers agreed with the artist, had awakened forces slumbering in Gislander.

Proudly, Swedish newspapers reported on the fact that the Danish king himself attended the exhibition by the Skåne artist. While they hailed Gislander’s exhibition as national success, on the Danish side the same event sparked political debates about the role of art and statehood:

Why did it have to be a Swedish painter to steal these gems in the Danish crown? And how could the nation ensure that, in the future, its best artists would make the Danish possessions in the North Atlantic visible as part of the kingdom?

The success, however, did not last for Gislander.

The years after the exhibition, he continued to move between Skåne, Småland and Copenhagen, painting landscapes and birds in Denmark, Holland and Sweden. Yet never again does he seem to have surpassed the Faroese moment of 1924.

His last major exhibition followed in 1931. Six years later, after contracting pneumonia on a journey to Småland, he died in Vetlanda at the age of forty-six.

Soon after, the traces began to thin.

In 1962, twenty-five years after his death, the Art Association of Vetlanda commemorated William Gislander with a modest retrospective.

None of the works shown came from the Faroes.

Ever since, his name and the panorama he opened in the North Atlantic have continued to fade from view.

The First Trace

For one century, Gislander’s 100 paintings from the Faroe Islands have practically remained invisible.5 From a few lines about Gislander’s life and work drawn together in the Lexicon of Swedish Artists, I set out to find the pieces of a puzzle.6

First traces I found in the form of sales notes and thumbnail images from private auctions, textual descriptions of Gislander’s 1924 paintings as discussed (and sometimes printed) in historical newspapers, fragments of documentations surviving in gallery archives, acquisition notes, and replies I received from private collectors, museums and libraries, and auction houses.

Among these blips on my radar, there was one that brought a first set of pieces from the Faroe puzzle into my reach – a trace that led me straight to Copenhagen.

The winter after Gislander exhibited at Den Frie, the Praesidium of the Danish Parliament (Folketinget) bought one of his Faroe paintings: a note printed that year, announced the acquisition of a work with the title Storm at Kirkebønæs, Faroe Islands.

On top of the sale, the note adds, the Swedish artist gifted the institution two further artworks, their titles given as The Bright Nights. Motif from Højvig, and Evening Mood from the Fjäll of Mykenes.

The paintings, the note informs, are hung in Christiansborg Castle (the seat of the Danish parliament) – in the public area today known as Vandrehallen.7

Landscapes Filed with Birds

“We still have the paintings”, Maria replied to the email I sent to Folketinget right after I had read the acquisition note.

“One of them is on display in the office of a member of parliament, the other two in the depot.”

We met a few weeks later, after I had passed through security at Christiansborg.

“The Danish Parliament owns about 3000 artworks”, Maria explained as we walked up the stairs. “The members can choose which ones they want to have in their offices.”

“Do we know when and why Gislander’s paintings were removed from this area?”, I asked as we passed the Vandrehallen.

“No, it seems we don’t,” Maria said.

Swiping her card, she opened a security door to the depot: staggered wire grids on roller rails, both sides covered to the top with paintings.

Maria pulled out one of the grilles.

Within a gilded frame, I saw the painting of a stirred-up sea, the swell surging high against a promontory. Where the crests of the waves curl, the waters break into a translucent green. This was “Storm at Kirkebønæs (Faroes)” – the painting the parliament had originally bought.

Only as I moved closer, I noticed birds Gislander had added above the spray, almost invisible to the eye. On the avian specks, he had placed dots of white – a flight of guillemots, their bright bellies turned towards the viewer as the birds skimmed the sea against Æðuryggurin, the silhouette of Héstur Island.

From the depot Maria pulled out a further grid.

From a green-blue sea that fills the foreground rises a slope dotted with boulders. A flock of back-lit coastal ducks makes its way over the ridge, across a sky in the yellow tones of Midsummer and hints of dusky blue. Pollamjørki rises from the hollow that drops behind the slope – the mist that creeps up the fjords of the Faroes at this time of the year.

This was “The Bright Nights. Motif from Højvig (Faroes)” – one of the two paintings Gislander had added to the 1924 sale.

The Final Chord

The way to the third painting led us to the office wing of the Parliament.

On the stairs, Maria stopped for a chat with a politician, my age perhaps.

“He has a Mikines in his office”, she dropped as we continued.

We stepped down towards a corridor that unfolded as an endless series of doors; a narrow avenue cozily lit by ball lamps dangling from the vault, illuminating what seemed a Danish take on the Sibyl’s Cave at Cumae.

“This is part of the old Ridebane,”, Maria commented as we made our way down the corridor, our steps muffled by the carpet. “The royal stables.”

“This is the only part remaining from the old Christiansborg.”

Door after door followed to the left, until Maria stopped and knocked at one of the offices. The Member of Parliament was in.

Still shaking Sandra’s hand, I noticed the paintings behind her – a volcanic wasteland she had chosen as motif over her desk, furrowed by deep gorges.

She had gone for a kind of structured landscapes in both of the artworks she picked for her office, Sandra later explained. It corresponded with the one on the opposite wall – the painting for which I had come.

The third Gislander. The note to conclude the triad.

“Evening Glow on the High Fjäll, Mykenes (Faroes)”, the brass label read below.

For a moment, I felt carried into the fields above the village, on one of the days near mid-summer. Grass covers the slopes as they rise into the background, until its verdant cover thins out where the island reaches highest into the sky.

A rosy hue has already touched the clouds above, the colour that remains from the light’s passage through the atmosphere near the Atlantic horizon.

The last hour of sun illuminates the west-facing cliffs of the island. On the opposite side, shadow has begun to move in across the furrowed ground. Its edge rises up from the village side, as if levered upward by the sinking sun – a diagonal cutting the foreground in half.

In the bottom left corner, darkness has already engulfed the name of the artist.

The eighteen-year old boy from the village who followed the artist around during those days in summer – he continued his journey into the light of artistic fame.

By the time Sámal Joensen-Mikines had made a name as a painter, the memory of the Swede whose art first inspired his path was already fading.

Before I followed Maria out again into the corridor, I turned around between the door jambs, taking a last glance at the painting.

Behind one door in a row of dozens that looked the same, there it hung – a painting that was a piece within a puzzle of a hundred; one stone in the mosaic through which William Gislander had once made the Faroe Islands visible.

As we embarked on the walk back to where our circuit had begun, I couldn’t help but wonder:

How many more were still waiting to be found?

Further Readings and References

All translations and photographs are my own unless stated otherwise.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to all the people and institutions who supported the wider research underlying this project as abridged into this introductory article. You can find them in the acknowledgments of the project.

For this article, I would like express particular thanks to Maria Louise Sargant and Sandra Skalvig for their support at Christiansborg.

During his stay on the Faroe Islands, the Swedish painter William Gislander produced approximately 100 works (read more in the introductory article).

• The list below gathers 60 paintings of which traces exist (photographs, descriptions, titles), yet which still remain to be located

• So far, 7 of Gislander’s Faroese paintings could be located in private collections. 6 could be traced in public ownership (you can read about some encounters with these paintings here)

• This leaves approximately 30 works of which no trace has been identified so far

To continue this research, we depend on the support of private collectors and citizens. Please be in touch at contact@gislander1924.eu:

• if you own one of the paintings listed below and would like to support our research (for example, with reproductions, physical details, histories)

• if you can share further information about one of these works,

• if you know of any further works from Gislander’s stay on the Faroes

• if you spot any mistakes in the current attributions of landscapes or birds,

• or if you would like to draw attention to anything else in the wider context.

All information you share will be treated confidentially. It will be published only with your consent and according to your wishes for privacy.

Contact by mail

Browse the Search List

Please note that the list below is work-in-progress and that titles and attributions may change.

I owe my gratitude to a large number of institutions and individuals who supported this work (see Acknowledgments). The modern reproductions below are included courtesy of the auction houses named in the individual entries.

In a few cases, the relevant rights holders or responsible parties could no longer be identified, or contact could not be established; further information or corrections are welcome.

Last updated: 23 June 2026.

0. Printed Material

0. Catalogue of the exhibition William Gislander, Den Frie Udstilling, September-October 1924, Copenhagen.

The accounting books at the archive at Den Frie mentioned the sales of several hundred printed copies of an exhibition catalogue.

No copy is known to be extant in the collections of KB Copenhagen, UB Lund, KB Stockholm, Konstbibliotek Stockholm.

I. Paintings Known from Modern Reproductions

1. “Guillemots in Flight”

Oil on canvas, 100 x 125cm.

Sold on 13 Jun 2023 by Bruun Rasmussen as “Skræmde Lomvier”.

Title here given after Tingakrossur, 31 July 1924 (“‘Strækkende lomvier’ við hinum skúmandi brimi í neðra”).

2. “Eider Ducks near the Cave”

Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm.

Sold on 10 June 2020 by Bukowskis as “Fåglar till havs”.

Title taken from a painting described as “… ‘Ederfugle ved Grotten’, where the gaze rests upon the blue depths” in Tingakrossur, 31 July 1924.

3. “View over Ostnæs” (Udsigt over Ostnæs)

Oil on panel, 30 x 48 cm.

Sold on 6 March 2023 by Bruun Rasmussen as “Rocky coastal view at twilight, the Faroe Islands”.

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books. Acquired by the Danish King in 1924.

4. “View from the Mykines Cliffs towards Vestmanna” [my title]

Oil on panel, 100 x 130 cm.

Offered for sale on 25 June 1997 by Nellemann-Thomsen, Viby, Århus, Kunstauktion 718 (lot 1035), as “Klippekyst, Færøerne”.

5. “View from the Mykines Cliffs towards Vestmanna, with Gannets” [my title]

Oil on panel, 78 x 64 cm.

Offered on 13 March 1996 by Sagførernes Auktioner, nr. 4741 (C2796), nr. 106 / p. 12 as “Klippekyst med måger” (depicted on p. 9). Described and printed with the caption “Färöer” in Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 04.10.1924.

6. “Gannet Chick” (Havssuleunge)

Oil on canvas, 66 x 60 cm.

Sold on 7 December 2012 by Helsingborgs Auktionsverk.

7. “Puffin Cliffs”

Oil on panel, 127 x 127 cm.

Sold on 18 May 1994 by Bruun Rasmussen, Jubilee Auction 600 (C2695I), lot 00433, as “Klippelandskab med søpapegøjer”.

8. “The Silent Evening” (Stille Aften)

Oil on panel, 49 x 42 cm.

Sold on 02 February 2016 by Skånes Auktionsverk (lot 135) as “Stilla afton”.

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

9. “Portrait of the Old Teacher Abrahamsen from Mykines”
(Portræt av den gamle Lærer Abrahamsen fra Myggnæs).

Oil on canvas, 63 x 60 cm.

Sold on 30 October 2021 by Auktionshuset Kolonn as “Mansporträtt”. Identification and title after Nationaltidende, 12.10.1924 (Sunday supplement).

10. “Agitated Sea with Gannets (?) near Nolsoy, Faroe Islands”

Oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm.

Sold on 2 December 1997 by Bruun Rasmussen (lot 206) as “Oprort hav med måger ved Store Dimon, Fæoerne”.

11. “View towards Nólsoy, Faroe Islands”

Oil on canvas, 30.5 x 46 cm.

Sold on 19 March 2019 by Bruun Rasmussen as “Udsigt mod Nolsø, Færøerne”.

12. “Coastal View”

Oil on unknown material, 86 x 91 cm.

Sold on 8 December 2014 by Metropol Auktioner, untitled.

13. “Hare in Winter Coat in Late Winter Mountains” [my title]

Oil on canvas, 85 x 115 cm.

Sold on 18 August 2024 by Skånes Auktionsverk.

14. “Coastal View” (Bøsdalafossur?)

Oil on panel, 52.5 x 62 cm.

Sold on 7 March 2016 by Bruun Rasmussen (lot 689) as “Coastal Scenery”.

15. “Agitated Sea at Kirkebønes” [my title]

Oil on unknown material, 47 x 61cm.

Sold on 9 February 2013 by Crafoord, Lund (lot 484) as “marint motiv”.

16. “Fishing Gannets at Sea”

Oil on panel, 80 x 104 cm.

Sold on 30 March 2015 by Bruun Rasmussen (lot 148).

17. “Gannet [?] over Agitated Sea”

Oil on panel, 47 x 61 cm.

Sold on 17 April 1993 by Falkkloo’s (spring auction, lot 00091) as “Upprort hav med sjöfågel”.

18. “Seal Family on Skerry”

Oil on panel, 86 x 126 cm.

Sold on 5 January 2015 by Bruun Rasmussen as “Sälfamilj på skäret”.

19. “Seal with Catch”

Oil on panel, 93 x 117 cm.

Sold on 6 November 2015 by Sikö Auktioner.

20. “Cormorants on a Skerry”

Oil on panel, 63 x 128 cm.

Sold on 24 November 2001 by Falkkloo’s, Höstauktionen 2001 (lot 00362).

21. “Great Cormorants in the Surf”

Oil on canvas, 165 x 116 cm (incl. frame).

Sold on 25 September 2024 through Laholms Auktionskammare as “Storskarv i strömmande fors”.

II. Paintings Known from Newspaper Reproductions

22. “Great Cormorants at Hestur” / “Morning Mist near Hestur”
(“Storskarver paa Hestø” / “Morgentaage ved Hestø”).

23. “Floating Gannets” (Svømmende Havsuler)

24. “Swans in Flight” (Trækkende Svaner)

This is a version of a painting already located in private posession. The winter motif shows Nólsoy in the background, snow fall, and the flight of swans coming in from the left.

25. “Vampires of the Air” (Luftens Vampyrer).

Bought by “Arkitekt Berg” in 1924 according to the accounting books at Den Frie.

26. “Seaside View from Sandoy” (Kustparti fra Sandø)

27. “The Troll Woman’s Finger”

“… [when we visited Gislander in his atelier], he was putting the finishing touches on a canvas from Vágar, on which one can see, among other things, the finger of the Troll Woman pointing mysteriously toward the heavens, as if in warning” (translated from an interview in Dimmalætting, 26.07.1924)

“‘The Troll Woman’s Finger’, a crooked obelisk-like cliff …” (translated from a list of paintings seen at Den Frie as provided in Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 04.10.1924).

With reservations, this may be the painting reproduced in Nationaltidende, 09.01.1927, p. 11 (see below). This article reproduces two other paintings by Gislander. The caption does not mention an artist’s name, stating only “Parti fran Norderoerne”.

With som license, the motif may be identified as Trøllkonufingur on the island of Vágar. The quality of the reproduction allows limited conclusions. In any case, the painting appears somewhat different in mood and style of waves from others by Gislander.

III. Paintings Known from Descriptions

28. “Evening Glow over the Atlantic” (Aftonglöd över Atlanten)

“In ‘Aftonglöd över Atlanten’, Gislander has managed to capture a sense of infinity and peace spreading across the sea on a calm evening, just as the sun’s disk descends to the horizon.” (translated from Arbetet, 09.10.1924). See also Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 04.10.1924.

29. “Sun Haze over the Surf” (Soldis over Brænding)

“…. the foam-spray shines white in a way that is at the same time fantastical and realistic against the deep-blue sea behind, against the red and yellow-green sky” (translated from Dagens Nyheder, 28.09.1924). Also in Tingakrossur, 31.07.1924.

The description matches that for a painting entitled “Sunset from Mykines” (Solnedgång från Myggenäs) as described in Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 04.10.1924.

30. “Evening Mood from the Mykenesfjäll”

“In ‘Aftonstämning från Myggenäsfjället’, two shaggy island horses graze on the headland as it glows red in the evening light” (translated from Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 04.10.1924).

31. “Herring Gull Chick” (Havsmåsunge)

“… his ‘Havsmåsunge’, among stones below a mountain stream on a green slope, which naturally calls Liljefors to mind” (translated from Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 04.10.1924, p. 10).

32. “Brooding Eider Duck on Mountain Slope with Buttercups”

“Gislander also depicts … the mountain slope with quite familiar yellow flowers, where the eider duck broods among large boulders” (translated from Nationaltidende, 28.09.1924, p. 2).

The buttercup (sólja) is the national flower of the Faroes.

33. “Brown Wild Bird on Ground of Similar Colour”

“Gislander also depicts … a small patch of grey-brown ground, where a wild bird of the same colour has come to rest” (translated from Nationaltidende, 28.09.1924, p. 2).

Potentially the painting of a whimbrel mentioned as no. 53.

34. “Loons in Flight”

“… the fine mist-softened ‘Strækkende lommer’” (translated from Tingakrossur, 31.07.1924).

35. “Expedition ship Grønland (16 July 1924)”

Gislander sketched this ship bound for the Scoresby Sound during its stopover in Tórshavn, see Nationaltidende, 03.08.1924, p. 4.

IV. Paintings Known from Their Title

36. “View over Koltur” (Udsigt over Koltur).

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

37. “Northern Tip of Kalsoy” (Nordspedsen af Kalsö).

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

38. “Afternoon Sun” (Eftermiddagssol).

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

39. “View from Mykenesholmur” (Udsigt fra Myggenæs Holm)

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

In 1924, the painting was acquired by the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen Joachim Beck-Friis. In 1930, he donated a painting to the art collection of Lund University. During an inventory taken at Lund in 1986, this painting registered as “Motiv från Färöerna” was missing. The current restructuring of the collections does not allow further investigations before the end of 2027.

40. “Early Morning” (Tidlig Morgen)

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

Possibly the same painting whose title is given as “Morgenstemning” in Tingakrossur, 31.07.1924.

41. “Mallard with Ducklings” (Graaand med Ællinger)

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.
Motif mentioned as villonti with young in Tingakrossur, 31.07.1924.

42. “The Northern Islands” (Norderoerne)

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

43. “Bad Humour[?]” (Daarligt H[umør?])

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

44. “Specks of Sunlight” (Solstænk)

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

45. “Moonshine over Nólsoy” (Maanesken over Nolsö)

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books.

46. “Storm Gathering over Nólsoy” (Optrækkende uvejr over Nolsø)

Title as mentioned in Tingakrossur, 31.07.1924.

47. “Landscape with Sheep”

Oil on panel, 36 x 44 cm.

Sold on 29 November 2011 by Lauritz, Roskilde as “Landskab med får”, no illustration. Relation to the Faroes dubious, inferred by the given year (1924) and title.

48. “Coastal Motif with Sunset and Horse”

Unknown material, 61 x 60 cm.

Offered at Konst- och antikvitetesauktion med modern design in spring 1992 by Göteborgs Auktionsverk (lot 00045) as “Kustmotiv med häst i solnedgang”, no illustration.

49. “Guillemots Taking Flight” (Lettende lomvier)

Title as mentioned in Tingakrossur, 31.07.1924.

50. “Eider Ducks Taking Flight at Kirkjubøur Ness”
(Lettende Edefugle ved Kirkebø Næs)

Title as mentioned in Nationaltidende, 28.09.1924, p. 1.

51. “Gannets”

Oil on canvas, 66 x 60 cm.

Sold on 12 July 2012 by Helsingborgs Auktionsverk as “Havssulor”, no reproduction.

52. “Morning Mist with S[…] in Flight”
(Morgentaage med strækkende S[…])”

Title as mentioned in Den Frie accounting books. Candidates for the illegible species could be gannets (suler), cormorants (skarver), swans (svaner).

53. “Eurasian Whimbrel”

Motif (spógvi) as mentioned in Tingakrossur, 31.07.1924. Probably the same motif mentioned as regnspurv in Nationaltidende, 04.12.1924 and regnsporv in Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 04.10.1924, p. 10.

Potentially the painting mentioned above under no. 33.

54. “Birds over the Sea”

Oil on canvas, 100 x 120 cm.

Sold on 22 June 2016 by Auktionshuset Hørsholm as “Fugle over havet”, no reproduction.

55. “Birds over the Sea”

Oil on panel, 39 x 43 cm.

Sold on 26 September 2014 by Lauritz, Herlev as “Fugle på hav”, no reproduction.

56. “Birds over the Sea”

Oil on panel, 48 x 63 cm.

Sold on 15 December 2014 by Lauritz, Herlev as “Fugle på hav”, no reproduction.

57. “Sea View from the Faroes”

Oil on panel, 58.5 x 73 cm.

Sold on 14 July 2016 by Lauritz, Herlev as “Havparti fra Færøerne”, no reproduction.

V. Attribution Unclear

58. “Travelling Birds”

Oil on canvas, 69 x 90cm.

Sold on 17 July 2023 by Bukowskis. The given year matches Gislander’s stay. However, it is unclear if the seascape and/or birds relate to the Faroes.

59. “Floating Loons”

Unknown material, 69 x 118cm.

Sold on 24 February 1999 at Bruun Rasmussen (International Auktion 658, Part 1: Danish Golden Age Paintings, lot 350) as “Svømmende sortstrubet lom”, no date given.

60. “Floating Black Ducks Off the Faroes”

Unknown material, 83 x 100 cm.

Offered on 13–15 March 1933 for sale from two private collections by Kunsthallens Auktioner as “Svømmende Sortænder under Færøerne, 1931”, advertised in Berlingske Tidende, 09.03.1933.

The date given for the painting does not match Gislander’s stay on the islands.

In 1924, the Swedish painter William Gislander spent nine months on the Faroe Islands. During this period, the artist produced approximately 100 works, depicting land- and seascapes as well as the islands’ wildlife.

Around 20 paintings were sold already before he left the islands in September. Around 80 were shown at the exhibition that opened in Copenhagen at the end of September.

This exhibition was the first to ever open a panorama of the Faroe Islands and their fauna. Despite the immense echo it sparked at the time, it has remained a blind spot in the Nordic history of art (see the introductory article here).

An Overview in Numbers

(last updated: 11 May 2026)

If we depart from a total of 100 paintings, I have so far been able to physically locate 11% of them. 7 of these paintings are found in private collections. Only 4 are known to be in public possession (Listasavn Føroya, Danish Parliament).

For a century, the great majority of paintings Gislander created during his 1924 stay – around 95% – has remained in private ownership. The records they left rarely allow researchers to reach the works and the present owners. For reasons of privacy, changed ownership in or bankruptcy of auction houses, archival limits, or catalogue systems that have become inaccessible today, the trail often stops where a painting re-enters private life.

Researching this historical view on the Faroe Islands can therefore only succeed with the support of citizens and collectors.

For approximately 30 paintings William Gislander produced on the islands, a first trace still needs to emerge. With the search list linked below, I reach out to pursue known traces of 60 paintings (+ the 1924 exhibition catalogue) whose whereabouts remain unknown:

• 0. The 1924 exhibition catalogue: 1 open item

• I. Paintings known from modern reproductions: 21 open paintings

• II. Paintings known from newspaper reproductions: 6 open paintings

• III. Paintings known from descriptions: 8 open paintings

• IV. Paintings known from their title: 22 open paintings

• V. Attribution unclear: 3 open paintings

Please explore and help us to reconstruct a historical vision of the Faroe Islands!

The Search List