The name leaps out from a red track suit. With his back to me, Bach pulls the hose around the car. In the wet windshield, the mountain surrounding the bay appear in reflection.

That morning, I had woken on the opposite side, in Kambsdalur. Above the village rises the cone-shaped Mount Kambur, part of the mountain chain surrounding the bay – and the subject of the view I had come to trace.

A tip after my lecture at Listasavn had brought me here, to the eastern side of Eysturoy.

“I think I know where that picture was made,” Martin had said after I showed him the auction photograph. Seeing me struggle with the Faroese spelling, he wrote down his suggestion: Fuglafjørður / towards Kambsdalur.

The sun had just begun to lift the shadow Mount Borgin casts over the industrial harbour. On the way to the water, I pass a sign in a red frame: “Welcome to Port of Fuglafjørd.”

The town’s name means ‘fjord of birds’. Beneath the words I spot a coat of arms – a red bird above three fish. Long before I reach the waterside, the smell reveals that the town is a hub of local fishing industry.

The Grey Line

The quay lies empty of ships this morning, and two yellow rails run along its edge. I follow their parallels down the harbour wall, my gaze fixed on the mountains across the fjord.

Almost exactly 102 years earlier, the steamer Sleipner had called at this bay. On 22 July 1924, William Gislander was on board.

From behind me, I hear the creaking of a metal hinge. The hollow echo of steel container walls follows. Cold-storage facilities have been excavated into Mount Borgin, and another workday is already in full swing.

Gulls wheel high above the chimneys, sending distant calls from the sky. A fulmar writes silent figures of eight as it patrols over the harbour basin, the drag from its wingtips drawing a wake at the turning points.

In the painting Gislander made of Kambur on the opposite shore of the bay, waterfalls draw white veins across the green slopes enclosing Kambsdalur. One of them emerges from the valley between the mountains. When Gislander set up his easel, ‘Kambsdalur’ then referred primarily to this valley; the village of the same name would not be established for another half-century.

Closer to the sea, a grey line crosses the waterfalls in the painting, gently descending as it hugs the lower slopes with almost mathematical precision. Across the bay, I see the same line carrying trucks and buses down to Fuglafjørður as if on a marble run.

I see rags of cloud move across Kambur. The watercourses Gislander painted a century ago have cut deep into the green below, and shadows cast by the hard sunlight are filling the scars.

The ridges continue to align just as in the painting as I continue a little further down the quay. The angles seem almost exact.

There is little doubt this is the spot. I raise the camera, then hesitate.

The Faroe Islands that Gislander’s exhibition presented to audiences in Copenhagen appeared untouched, void of human infrastructure.

To make my photograph resemble his painting, I would have to repeat this choice – and leave the harbour outside the frame. Yet already a century ago, a regular steamer service had given the painter access to the north-east of the Faroe Islands. Perhaps Gislander had even made this painting from the deck of the Sleipner, engines running.

A hundred and two years later, I decide to take a step back before taking the picture.

At the End of the Quay

I follow the yellow rails back to the head of the quay.

At their end, the man in the red tracksuit is still washing his car. Eventually, I give in to the urge.

“Is there is a local sportsman with the name of Bach?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “That’s the name of a composer.”

Then, after a moment, as if reacting to my puzzled face: “You can order them printed like this.”

It turns out that I am talking to the organist at the local church. He tells me that he plays Bach at almost every service, mostly cantatas. We drift into a Bach digression: Busoni’s transcriptions, Víkingur Ólafsson’s performances of them, the organs of Marcussen and Silbermann.

“Heðin,” he says, “Heðin Kambsdal.” He points across the bay. “It’s the name of the valley over there, beneath Mount Kambur.”

When I searched the church schedules later that day, I discovered that he was a painter, too. Again and again, Kambur appeared among the works he had exhibited across the islands.

I had spent the morning searching for the view point from which one artist had painted Kambur a century ago.

Another had been behind me all along, hosing down his car.

This article 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.

The mist is descending again.

From the church, I look towards where the island’s summit ought to be.

For the past few days, I have not seen the highest peak of Mykines once. Mons Pileatus, I recall the page in Ruskin’s Modern Painters – the cloud-capped mountain.1

In the other direction, where the valley embracing the village ebbs out, the winds from the west hurl waves into the narrow landing site. Through the silvery haze, I glimpse white crests out on the sea.

The island’s graveyard separates the church from the school, both buildings painted in white. I find the door open, and take a seat on one of the wooden benches. A dry-stone wall keeps out the gales I see brushing over the turf roofs outside.

On my skin, I feel the naked stones radiate cold.

Through the window, my view wanders towards the ridge that embraces the village on its southern side. The silhouette of a person in rain gear emerges and disappears in the mist, a farmer working on a sheep fence.

Somewhere up there I know a vantage point to lie where my Swedish painter placed his easel, painting one of his twenty landscape works from Mykines. It shows the Hólmur – that finger severed from the main island, reaching to the west.

Time Passes

Yet today is not the day to reconnect with this view a century later: Mist is cutting the Hólmur short.

From the window, my gaze wanders to the school’s head wall. Four panels inform visitors on the archaeology, birds, and art of of Mykines.

Two of them are titled Listamálarin Mikines – The Artist Mikines.

The painter’s first exhibition in 1927 is mentioned. The summer of 1924, when the eighteen-year-old Sámal Joesen Mikines encountered the Swede William Gislander and was amazed by his large-format landscape canvases, is not.

A few weeks earlier, I went to see one of those paintings at Gallerí Havnará in Tórshavn. The painting depicting the Hólmur is currently for sale, and through the glass front, I see it lean against a fair-faced concrete wall, still enclosed in plastic and tape.

I had first met Bogi and his wife Jóhanna – the owners of the gallery – at a vernissage a few weeks before. When I return to meet Bogi that evening, he has already brought the painting out of storage.

I call him and watch the nearby river that gives the gallery its name play with a ball caught in a waterfall.

A few minutes later, Bogi arrives in work clothes. He is renovating upstairs, he tells me as we unwrap the painting.

Together, we lift the frame to the wall, then take a few steps back.

What strikes me first is the darkness.

I had seen a photograph of the painting on the gallery homepage. It shows the motif in bright colours, some parts overexposed. “It is really hard to photograph well in this light,” Bogi explains as I adjust my camera.

The painting had been stored for decades in the attic of a previous owner, he adds, probably forgotten among some other hundred she collected. The tape around its wrapping fell to pieces when they removed it, Bogi says.

“I guess to some degree, the darkening comes from the varnish,” I say.

Up close, I see streaks running vertically across its surface, presumably from the protective cover applied a century ago. The frame and brass badge at the bottom still seems the originals applied for the 1924 exhibition, similar to the ones I had seen in other paintings.

In its foreground, lichen-covered boulders mark the terrain, capturing the light of the late evening. Beyond the edge of the ridge lies the village of Mykines, invisible to the viewer – the white walls of the church and the school, and the black houses with their grass-covered roofs.

A brown horse with a bright mane stands besides the boulders.

The motif recalls another painting with the title “Evening Mood over the Mykenesfjäll” praised at the Copenhagen exhibition: “Two shaggy horses, typical of the islands, are seen grazing on the russet headland.”2

This painting shows a single animal. Still, it seems to belong to the same series of evening views over the Atlantic that repeatedly drew Gislander onto the ridges above Mykines.

From their vantage points, he seems to have painted some of the strongest works of his career – paintings that the young Sámal Joensen Mikines later remembered as formative in his decision to become a painter.

The Lighthouse

Bogi and I move away from the concrete wall and sit on folding chairs beside the gallery window. After a while, we I agree, some of the darkness seems to lift and the colours begin to brighten.

“There’s something quite Impressionist about the horizon,” Bógi says.

Gislander did not consider himself a member of any particular school. He called himself a naturalist instead.3 Here, however, the subject seems to be light itself. In interviews, he described its shifts as one of the islands’ greatest fascinations.

As we let the impression of the painting sink in further, more features emerge: lit edges in the terrain, illuminated by the last light.

A single white mark catches my eye.

I point towards the Hólmur and turn to Bogi.

“There – he actually painted the lighthouse.”

The white brushstroke on the Hólmur felt remarkable: Gislander usually kept modern infrastructure outside his Faroese landscapes. In 1924, the lighthouse was only fifteen years old. As far as my current research suggests, it is the only piece of man-made infrastructure he included in one of his Faroese painting.

The same brushstroke anchored another story, too.

I told Bogi about Knud Johannes Rohmann, the Danish dentist who travelled through the islands in 1924 and occasionally shared Gislander’s chartered boat. In early May, a joint attempt to reach Mykines had failed in the currents off Vágar.

Rohmann returned to Tórshavn; Gislander pressed on alone to arrive in time for the migrations of birds.

Rohmann finally reached Mykines later that month, on the day of Ascension. In a letter published by his local newspaper, he described walking with Gislander from the village across the breakneck hanging bridge to the Hólmur, descending to the gannet colony and then climbing to the lighthouse.

“There,” Rohmann wrote, “we left our names in the guestbook.”

A few years after the lighthouse represented by that white stroke, the house of its former keeper was built not far from the beacon. Heini Heinesen spent his childhood in that house; his father was one of the men who operated the lighthouse.

I had written to Heini about the guestbook Rohmann mentioned. A week after my visit to Gallerí Havnará, he replied.

In the meantime, he had crossed to the Hólmur to check.

The visitor books from the 1920s are still there, he wrote. Attached to Heini’s email were photographs of their pages.

On 29 May 1924, a party from Tórshavn had entered their names. Rohmann was among them, signing himself as traveller with the nom de guerre “Gianni.”

Further below, in a hand I had known only from the lower-right corners of paintings, there was another name:

William Gislander.
Artist.
Falsterbo, Sweden.

Notes and Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Bogi Andreasen and Heini Heinesen for their support of my research.

3

See e.g. Nationaltidende, 29.09.1924, p. 4.

---

This article 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.

“Have you checked Tórshavn Municipality?” Ole said. “They have an art collection, too.”

The weather was mild the day we met in Café Paname, and on summery days like these, Ole wears a hand-picked flower in his ponytail.

An artist with an antiquarian curiosity, he has explored many of the nooks and crannies of Faroese history. We met a few days into my stay on the islands, and quickly connected over a passion for the obscure and overlooked.

With a further lead in my notebook, I returned to Listasavn that day.

The same afternoon, a man passed through our office, carrying a painting. As he disappeared into the director’s room, a colleague said, “That’s Helgi Fossádal.”

I recognised the name. A few months earlier, Helgi had replied to an inquiry I had sent by email. A collector, he manages the art collection of Føroya Banki.

“We have one Gislander in our collection,” Helgi had written. That afternoon, he had come to deliver the painting for the lecture I would give that weekend.

I caught Helgi on his way out.

“This should be the southern tip of Kúnoy, as seen from Klaksvík,” he explained.

Seaside Views

Helgi’s painting pointed towards a trail Gislander may have followed through the north-eastern Faroes. On the Friday after my presentation, I encountered what seemed to be two further signposts on his path.

Painted oxblood red, Móttøkuhúsið stands out among the houses of central Tórshavn. Built in 1923, it has been used since 1989 to receive official guests. It also houses part of the municipal art collection.

Niels Winther av Sandi collected art throughout his life. A carpenter by trade, he worked in several parts of the North Atlantic. Seventy-five works in his collection depict the Faroes. Tórshavn Municipality acquired it in 1987.

I met Jákup Simonsen on the ground floor of Móttøkuhúsið. Following Ole’s tip, Jákup confirmed that among its roughly 2,500 works, the municipal collection also held two paintings by Gislander.

The rooms inside Móttøkuhúsið were neatly arranged and did not speak of heavy use. I followed Jákup into a room filled with coastal views hung salon-style, dominated by a seascape by the Danish painter Christian Blache.

Here, Jákup had set out the two works he had kindly retrieved from storage.

The paintings were loosely worked, apparently with a quick hand. The sketch-like handling, low viewpoints, and expanses of open water suggested that Gislander had painted from a vessel rather than the shore.

Did he have any idea where they were painted?

“No,” Jákup replied. “In the catalogue, it simply says fjøll. That could mean almost any kind of landscape in the Faroes.”

Ports of Call

It was less a title than a placeholder.

The three coastal views sent me back to a newspaper interview I had encountered during my earlier research.

Around Ólavsøka 1924, I had read, the Danish Nationaltidende sent the reporter Martin Nørgaard to the Faroe Islands to cover the visit of the Danish foreign minister. In a later interview with a local newspaper, Nørgaard recalled touring the islands aboard the steamer Sleipner together with Gislander, who painted during the voyage.

Sleipner’s circuit ran once a month around the Faroes. The routes were published in the main newspapers. The voyage Gislander shared with Nørgaard around the islands was likely the run in the second half of July.

One stop on the steamer’s itinerary that month brought a further of Gislander’s ‘northern paintings’ back to mind. Fuglafjørður appeared on Sleipner’s route after Klaksvík – a name connecting with a clue I had received for a hitherto unidentified view at my lecture.

The two paintings in the municipal collection remain unidentified so far. But the newspaper schedule changed the question they posed.

Rather than asking only which parts of the Faroes Gislander had painted, I could now begin to ask on which journey Sleipner had carried him – and what he might have seen from its deck along the way.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ole Wich, Helgi Fossádal, Jákup Simonsen, and Martin for their support of this research.

This article 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 got a mail for you,” Anna Maria from Listasavn said when I came into the office that morning. “Teitur wrote. He’s a local collector.”

“He says he has two Gislanders.”

The lecture and outreach campaign we had started the week before appeared to be working. The iron was hot, and I called Teitur immediately.

“It’s a bit tricky these days with my schedule,” he said, “but can you come … now?”

Ten minutes later, I got off my bike at an address in central Tórshavn. Teitur had made some room between meetings to show me his two Gislanders.

Harsh Weather

As we climbed to the first floor, Teitur explained that he had begun buying Faroese paintings early on. The apartment we entered had a period atmosphere – 1960s or 1970s, I guessed. Antique furniture decorated the rooms.

On the wall over the sofa, I spotted the first Gislander.

“Looks like another view he painted on the western coast of Streymoy,” I said.

I knew of different versions in which Gislander had painted agitated seascapes west of Kirkjubønes (see no. 15 in the Search List and the painting acquired by the Danish Parliament in 1924).

In this one, Gislander had rendered the water in remarkable colours. Shades of turquoise and aquamarine shimmer beneath windblown crests. Above, sunlight slips past the merlons of a wall of clouds, its underside glowing as if lit by a furnace blazing beyond the horizon.

A flight of guillemots seems to flee the infernal scene, towards a promontory that invades the background, looming like the head of a sperm whale breaking into the agitated sea.

“Can I see the back and measure the frame?” I asked Teitur.

He took the painting down, placing it carefully on the sofa.

Handwritten notes ran all around the back of the frame. At the bottom, one seemed to preserve the original title: “Harsh Weather (from the West Coast of Streymoy, Faroe Islands – In the background: Dalsnypen / Dalsnýpa)”.1

The title named the promontory visible in the background – the ridge around Dalsnýpa, which Gislander had also painted from different angles, as I had learned.

A provenance chain unrolled all around the title, continuing to the top part of the frame. The dates spanned almost one century. Yet it was the bottom corners that caught our attention. To the right: “To my wife / 20 November 1928”. On the left: “From my beloved husband Oliver Effersø to my birthday 20–11–28.”

“That’s the brother of Rasmus, the politician!” Teitur said. “You’ve seen his statue down at the parliament, right?”

Mezzanine

“Shall we go and see the other one?” Teitur asked once I had closed my notebook and finished taking photographs.

On the floor above, he had said, was waiting the second Gislander.

Halfway up the stairs, I stopped.

“You know you have a third Gislander?” I asked.

Teitur turned around. I pointed to a portrait hanging above our heads.

I had seen reproductions of this painting before – in newspapers from 1924 and in auction records. In interviews I had read, Gislander repeatedly referred to a single portrait he had painted on the islands – depicting ‘the old teacher Abrahamsen from Mykines’.

Until then, that trail had been tantalisingly incomplete. It ended in a 2021 auction record. Privacy regulations had brought the search to a halt.

By sheer accident, I now found myself face to face with the elusive portrait in a Tórshavn stairwell.

We leaned towards its lower-right corner. On the darkened surface, only a few letters of the painter’s signature were visible. In stronger light, however, the full name emerged: William Gislander.

By the time we reached the next painting, the arithmetic had already changed.

The Gislander waiting upstairs was now the third of the afternoon. Looser and more rapidly executed, it surrendered its story less readily than the other two. It depicted a sea view with bird cliffs – painted from a place still to be identified.

Somewhere beyond the apartment walls, another stretch of the Faroese coast was waiting to be found.

References

“Yeah, that could be down there,” the farmer said when I showed him the painting.

“You need to climb over that fence” – he stretched out his arm from a blue overalls – “then, there’s a ladder further down. From there, you can continue down to the coast.”

It seemed to be the end of a workday for the two men I had met on the road down to Norðradalur. Near the village, I had seen them coiling a rubber hose onto a trailer; a black snake hoisted in from the pasture.

“We just put some fertiliser out, so you may want to change shoes ...,” they added not without a note of pity as I geared up for the descent.

Norðradalur lies near the right angle of two coast arms, roughly divided by a creek running from the village into the sea. South from it rises the face of Middagssteinur, while the ridge of Dalsnípa bulges in the west.

With these two elevations framing the view, the island of Koltur emerges in their middle, a blunted thorn protruding from the sea.

The hose had left an imprint in the grass, and I followed it across the pasture. With the green, the smell of sheep dung faded, too. I climbed down the cliffs, and whiffs of seaweed brooding in the sun took over.

Limpet shells lay scattered along the rocks, whose texture I felt scraping against my soles. In the area where the coastline flattened, the water from the creek fans out. Waves wash over stony plateaus that form the tidal zone, the swelling sea pushing back against the widening stream.

A small bird follows the foamy line where the creek meets the sea – a young sandpiper, perhaps, running from the waves as if in play, taking to flight the moment the sea appears to win.

Water heaves where the skerries drop, and I hear the largest breakers displace the air with the sound of a car door slammed. I check the calendar. Low tide was two hours ago. The sea is rising again.

A high-pitched sound pulses through the rumble of the waves. Turning my head, my eyes lock onto a streak of orange, black, and white.

In the oystercatcher’s line of flight, I continue towards the arm of the shore that reaches westwards into the sea. Sun-dried seaweed crumbles under my hand as I seek hold on my way down. Soon, my feet touches plants wet from the last high tide.

Between the rocks I see clefts gape, narrow pools filled from the swell and hit by the harsh light of the late afternoon. At their bottom, algae grow of rosy hues. Limpets cling to the walls like the teeth of a carnivorous abyss, their striated domes reminding of the islands that rise on this horizon.

The White Line

Across the skerries I move towards that place I hope to find closer to the waves – a spot from which a fine white line appears along the western edge of this shore: the fall of Nípufossur cascading into the sea.

It was this detail that I had chosen to approximate the position from which Gislander painted – a waterfall dropping down from the carved-out mountain bulge; perpendicular at first, then sprouting into the sea beneath.

In the seascape Gislander painted, the ridge around the fall lies brown from winter, and patches of snow still remain in folds of the terrain.

Gislander came here in early spring, the view suggests.

A little further down the shore, I find a spot where Nípufossur seems to align with the painting. Within a narrow margin of angles, I continue on slippery rocks as far as the incoming tide permits, exploring from where the shoreline best resembles the one Gislander painted.

In the carpet of seaweed, I seek pockets dotted with barnacles as I inch towards a nose protruding from the rocks, further towards the waves.

Each time the water hits, I suppress the instinct to evade onto soapy ground.

Back in 1924, Norðradalur was a village less accessible from Tórshavn. Had Gislander been put ashore here from a boat? I begin to wonder. He painted close to the splash zone, so much seemed sure.

I moved a few steps back again, taking in the rhythm of the ocean at a safer distance. In the background, Nípufossur draws its white line against a backlit mountain ridge.

Up here, it dawns on me that the waterfall may not have been the only reason Gislander chose this spot. Some ten metres off the shore, the backwash of the surge rears the waters that push forward, rounding them into a barrel shining in translucent blue.

This is a perfect spot to study waves, I realise.

The Study of Waves

Wave after wave I watch form and collapse off the shore, and I note my mind wandering off to Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage (‘Anniversaries’) and its opening lines, in which the author described the waves on the Baltic Sea:

“Crests stretched tight, already welted white, wrap round a cavity of air crushed by the clear mass like a secret made and then broken.” 1

Perhaps it was the certainty of waves that drew Gislander to this coast in the first place. From my vantage point, a reason for their shape becomes apparent.

Not far off lies a bank at whose edge first waves begin to form. Checking the original painting, I notice that Gislander had actually depicted this feature in the sea: a streak of brown shimmers to the left, beneath what seems to be high tide.

“The sea is clearly the right element of the artist,” I remembered an art critic writing in 1924, “but no longer the murmuring flirtation of the Baltic with the bathing beach, but foaming, thunderous breakers crashing against the rocky coast.”2

When Gislander exhibited his paintings in 1924, in the eyes of many critics his seascapes outshone his original subject. Against the water he elevated to the main protagonist, his birds became mere staffage.

The Faroes seem to have taught Gislander to paint the sea. Perhaps it was through these agitated seascapes that his presence stylistically mattered most for the young Sámal Joensen, who followed the Swedish painter around on Mykines in 1924.

During the six weeks Gislander spent on that island, his own wave paintings reached a new intensity. His studies around the steep landing site on Mykines resulted in a series of paintings, depicting the towering formations of waves (e.g. see no. 1 and no. 16 in the Search List).

There are subtler tones in his paintings of waves, too – the forms in which he began to stylise the foam below their crests as they splash in sea caves, and whose fine moiré later reminded critics of painters such as Gustaf Fjæstad.

Overlooking the agitated sea, I thought that all this had in some way evolved from the early studies Gislander conducted along the Faroese coasts – at places like these, where the open Atlantic drives its waters against the coast of Streymoy, in a display of force and awe that was beyond anything the Baltic Sea could muster.

Over the past week, I had sought out viewpoints from which Gislander had painted, and it had left me untouched whenever I found our views coincide. Yet in sight of these Atlantic waves, there was a different sensation I felt arising.

Did Gislander experience the same awe, I wondered, when he stood here a century before, observing the waves as the Atlantic hurled its waters against these shores?

A further breaker hits the rocks, and the thought dissipates like the spray of seawater showering my back. A tongue of the tide follows racing up the rocks and breaks against my boots. The backwash is heavy, pulling my ankles towards the sea-grass, where one step means a slide down into the swell.

I choose to follow the barnacle trail back to higher ground.

A hood full of brine splashes down as I bow forward and begin my climb back to the pastures. Water squelches in my boots, wrapped in trousers heavy from the sea.

For a while, I had almost forgotten about the sheep.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jens Dam Ziska for pointing me in the direction of Norðradalur to search for the spot where this painting was made.

This article 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.

Do you have time … now?

If you work with journalists, I’ve learned, you have to react quickly.

A few days after Ingi and Gunnar had hosted Solveig, director of Listasavn Føroya, and me on Summarmorgun, I called Ingi again. We had spoken live on national radio about the search for Gislander’s one hundred Faroese paintings from 1924 – many of them surviving in private homes. After the broadcast, Ingi had mentioned that one of them had belonged to his grandmother.

Five minutes after my call, I was sitting inside his electric car outside Listasavn. Soon, we hummed up onto the ring road above Tórshavn.

He spoke of the motif – a sea gull – when he first mentioned the painting. “She really liked the bird”, Ingi told me in the car.

“So your grandmother – she is still alive?”

“No, no,” he said. “She passed away in 2018 – Ingeborg. She actually turned 100.”

“Her father came from Fugloy, in the northern islands. His name was Jógvan Zachariassen. He was a doctor who practised in Klaksvík and later in Tórshavn, where he became the national doctor.”

“There was the story circulating in the family that Gislander stayed at their home when he was painting up in the north. He paid them with the painting, it was sometimes said. But who knows …”

The Mykines Gulls

A few minutes later, we pulled in at the house of his mother’s sister.

Anna Sofia and Hilbert welcomed us at the door. Already from the threshold, I spotted the painting over the stairwell down to the ground floor.

At first glance, the subject seemed simple enough: two Great Black-backed Gulls (Larus marinus), a rather common breeding bird on the Faroes. But the setting mattered more than the birds.

Gislander showed the gulls in a relatively large format placed among the rocks of Mykines. In the background rose the cliffs of Vestmanna; a view he had painted in several variations during his six weeks on the island (see no. 4 and no. 5 in the Search List).

Apparently, this was one of the approximately twenty paintings Gislander produced during his stay on Mykines in 1924.

A New Lead

“There may actually be another Gislander in the family, I think,” Ingi said. “My grandmother gave it to another of her daughters.”

“So that one’s also still on the islands?”

“No. It’s in Canada.”

“Canada?”

“Yes. Ontario. We have relatives there. It’s with puffins, I think.”

“Exciting – you know, Gislander’s puffins had a rather mixed reception in the reviews here in 1924.”

“Haha, yes …”

“Would be great to have an image in any case!” I said.

“Well, let me see what I can do ...”

In a way, this project had begun by following a trail from Southern Patagonia to the Faroe Islands, and to the painters who made their wildlife and landscapes visible in art. Unexpectedly, the trail now pointed across the Atlantic again.

It didn’t take long before the birds arrived from the other side.

The week after our trip to the gulls, Ingi forwarded me an image he had received from Canada. Judging from the photograph, it was a typical Gislander. Like the gull painting, it showed birds placed on the ledges of a cliff – this time puffins, seen from various angles.

A further piece of the Mykines puzzle had emerged, so it seemed.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jens-Kjeld Jensen for confirming the identification of the gulls.

This article 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.

The words were meant as encouragement – despite sunshine outside, the lobby of Listasavn had filled with people for the Sunday afternoon lecture.

Among the audience at the National Gallery there were a few familiar faces: people with whom I had connected during my first week on the islands, and even before– the artist Ole Wich, the bird expert Sjúrður Hammer, and also Bárður Jákupsson, a central figure in Faroese art history.

Visitors had travelled from as far as the westernmost parts of the Faroes – Eirikur, relative of the painter whom I had met at the Mikines family home in Copenhagen, his wife Mia, and Oda, who has lived on Mykines for many years and still guides there.

Over the course of an hour, William Gislander and his scattered paintings took the stage. I traced the path that led the Swedish painter to the Faroes, and the roughly one hundred paintings he made during his stay.

Two originals were also on site and presented after the lecture: a puffin study from the collection of Listasavn, and a view from the Northern Islands from the collection of the Føroya Banki, personally brought in a few days earlier by Helgi Fossdal.

The hope shared by Listasavn and me was that a radio interview and a lecture early in my stay might help spread the word about the ongoing search for paintings, and gather insights and leads from the audience.

The plan seemed to work.

“You showed several paintings with the great cormorant,” Sjúrður said afterwards. “On the Faroes, that bird has been extinct since around the middle of the last century,” he pointed out. “These may actually be among the very few paintings showing it in this setting.”

“That coastal view you showed –” another visitor said.

I flipped back through the slides.

“Yes, that one, I think I know where it is” (he later wrote down the correct spelling on a piece of paper).

“Thanks for the talk,” Eirikur said after the talk. “We are going up to the house on Mykines Sunday next week. How long are you staying on the islands?”

“You have to come and visit.”

No single clue solves this puzzle. It is many clues and associations that move the search forward: remembered places, depicted histories, family memories; shared over paintings brought together again after one century.

What had begun as a trail of auction catalogues, newspaper notes, and paintings scattered across private collections had now taken a further step. For an afternoon at Listasavn, Gislander’s Faroe paintings entered public conversation again.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the team of Listasavn for their help organising and preparing the lecture, and to the audience who generously shared their ideas.

The lecture and this article were 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.

“You need to talk to Jens-Kjeld.”

I heard the same sentence several times during my first week on the Faroe Islands. Whenever I mentioned details in the bird and wildlife paintings William Gislander made here in 1924, one name came up.

Jens-Kjeld Jensen has lived on the island of Nólsoy for fifty years. A self-taught biologist and naturalist, he has become one of the people through whom the natural history of the islands is seen and remembered.

From the signpost where the few roads of the village meet, I followed the arrow to “The Bird Man.”

Jens-Kjeld’s knowledge of the natural world has become part of how people here orient themselves. I had called him a few days earlier. “I heard you on the radio”, he said in a Danish cadence before I even had stated the nature of my call.

He was busy that weekend and couldn’t make it to the lecture, but he was happy to welcome me at his home the following week.

After a 20-min ferry ride out of Tórshavn, I followed the path uphill, out of the village of some 200 souls, to the yellow, second-to-last house above the shore.

The Likelihood of Swans

A man with white hair and beard in a striped shirt opened the door. He first came to the Faroes with the Danish Navy, Jens-Kjeld explained as we take a seat at his kitchen table. In his left ear, I noticed a golden ring.

I had selected the paintings depicting Faroese wildlife from the presentation I had given the day before. One of them, I had traced to the home of a Danish collector in early spring. In its background rises the hump of Nólsoy, on whose outer left I now was the guest of Jens-Kjeld.

“This may be one of the earliest,” I explained.

“Gislander came to the Faroes in mid-January 1924. He speaks of the wintry conditions into which he arrived. Because of the snow and the migrating swans, I thought this could be from February or March.”

“Some years you see very few swans here on the islands,” Jens-Kjeld said. “It really depends on how the wind is that year.”

“What time of year do they usually show up?” I asked.

“I may have to go upstairs to check that on my computer sheet,” he said.

“If you don’t see them,” Jens-Kjeld explained at the table, “then the swans go straight over the sea, 200 km south of the Faroes. They only stop here if there is a low-pressure area between Iceland and the Faroes.”

“So it’s possible they stay for a few days in early spring – but only if the wind direction is bad that year.”

A few days later, Jens-Kjeld checked his spreadsheet, replying to my email: “Whooper swans have been seen in my notes on their way to Iceland throughout the month of March and a few days into April. And back to Ireland and Scotland in October. But there can always be some exceptions.”

The ifs in his explanation had planted a seed of suspicion.

I had seen photographs of other works by Gislander with swans over land- and seascapes – works he had painted elsewhere, in different years. From his formative years in southern Sweden, Gislander knew his swans – that much seemed certain.

There was also a similar painting by Gislander from the Faroes I had found reproduced in a 1924 newspaper. Again, it showed the hump of Nólsoy in the background, the swans flying in the other direction (a study for the first one)?

I began to wonder about records of weather conditions south of the Faroes in 1924.

Do they reach back far enough to tell us something about the likelihood of swans?

Winter Shades

I flipped to the next slide.

The snow-covered promontory of Eystnes appeared, as seen somewhere from the coast of Tórshavn. In the middle, a flight of Eider ducks passed a sea whose translucent waves revealed shades of the ground.

“I wondered if this could be from around the same time, because of the snow”, I said.

“The Eider is not like the swan, it stays here the whole year,” Jens-Kjeld explained. “The male’s plumage is completely black in summer. Here it is still in winter plumage.”

“So this could well be March, April, perhaps May, but not later.”

“If we follow the seasons, then we come to this painting here,” I said, flipping to the next slide. “In this one, the snow has already retreated.”

“Here you can see a hare leaping towards the mountain slope,”

“There is a hare?” Jens-Kjeld asked.

I pointed to the elongated form leaping over the snow patch, its fur and the black tips of its ears recalling the boulders dotting the surrounding slope.

His eyesight has diminished, Jens-Kjeld explained as he reached for a magnifying glass. I zoomed in as far as the resolution allows.

“This is very interesting,” he said.

“The hare is completely white. Go around the corner and have a look at the colour!”

I followed his directions into the adjacent room. Above a work bench hung a scientific drawing of a mite named in his honour. Three rows of shelves ran around the corners. On the top shelf, half a dozen of puffins faced me.

Moles and other small animals hung from wires, their teeth exposed. The furry curtain veiled the middle shelf, where Jens-Kjeld kept the chemicals and instruments he uses to stuff animals.

Further down, in the corner of the lowest shelf, I spotted the hare.

“You can see this is not white – this is blue,” Jens-Kjeld said. “In 1924, I think all hares in the Faroes were blue.”

“Blue?,” I asked somewhat perplexed.

“Well, you can see this is not completely white,” he explained.

“This species – it comes from Oslo, or from the south of Norway. It came to Faroes in 1855. After another fifty years, if I remember correctly, there were no white hares left in the Faroes – only the ones with the blue-grey fur. There is little snow here, so the white ones are easier to shoot.”

“You need to talk to Eyðfinn about this,” Jens-Kjeld added. “He is the expert for hares. If this picture is from 1924, I think there were no more white hares left. So maybe Gislander painted a very, very rare one.”

“But I mean there are some blue-grey spots here, if you look at the rear part,” I objected back at the screen. “You still think this is supposed to be a white one – perhaps the last one?”

Jens-Kjeld smiled. He maintained the hypothesis for the time being, and we agreed to let Eyðfinn have the final call.

“That would have been a real coup in 1924,” Jens-Kjeld said.

Eider Ducks, Summer

The last slide brought us to a living room in the suburbs of Copenhagen. Before Christmas, I had seen a painting of Eider ducks in a private collection.

I increased the zoom, and Jens-Kjeld closed in on the screen with his magnifying glass.

“Very interesting …” he said, and left for the other room.

He returned with a female Eider duck he had stuffed.

“If you look at the head in that painting, it goes straight up this way,” he said, pointing with his finger at the duck’s beak.

“Here you can see” - he pointed at a noticeable bump in the beak of the stuffed specimen – “the head goes ‘upstairs’. In Eider ducks from Sweden or Norway, it is flat.”

“You’re sure this is from the islands?”

I zoomed out again, revealing the ridge of Koltur on the horizon. The case seemed clear.

“So this suggests he painted the ducks as he knew them …”, I speculated. “He painted them as he had learned to paint them in Sweden.”

“Yes, that’s perhaps more likely than a Swedish Eider in the Faroes …”

Reading Change

Over the slides that remain, I collected notes from Jens-Kjeld’s observations. Many of them opened up a historical dimension in the paintings. I began to see birds in them that have disappeared (such as the cormorant), or whose migration patterns have changed.

“You’ve lived here such a long time,” I asked – “I suppose you’ve seen a lot of change over that time?”

“There is a lot of change across the islands, all the time.”

“If you take butterflies – 70 years ago, there were 55 different ones known. Today, there are 170. Some of them did not breed here for 100 years. Now they are all over the place.”

“With birds – 25 years ago, the robin didn’t breed here. The blackbirds have also returned. Then, the cormorant has disappeared. Other birds have become rare. The puffins have been fluctuating a lot. Today there is about 5% of their original population left.”

“But with the insects – are there more species now?,” I wondered?

“No, I don’t think so,” Jens-Kjeld said. “I think the population goes down. The reason you have more species now is because people have more time looking.”

“You know, I studied hoverflies,” Jens-Kjeld continued. “There were 12 – now it’s 29. Same with lice, fleas, or with mites on birds. It’s only because weird people do research on that.”

Over decades, articles that Jens-Kjeld wrote connected him with fellow enthusiasts on the islands and beyond. So did his appearances on the radio. Today, many researchers come to Nólsoy – to study the colony of storm petrels in its east, or the plants and insects thriving on the island.

“People seem to be more interested here in what surrounds them,” I said, “at least the ones I meet. They help me to see things I can’t notice. I really appreciate that.”

“It’s the same with many of the things I do,” Jens-Kjeld concurred. “If you talk to local people on a small island – some of them know a lot of very strange things you never think of knowing about.”

“A few years ago,” he added, “we were in a small village on Kalsoy, in the north. I talked with an old man, in his late seventies, about a special flower. He had last seen it when he was young.”

“He said: ‘If you go “upstairs” there, and go a little to the left, there are the flowers there. I have not seen them for the last 55 years. But I remember I have seen them there.’ And we go upstairs and, we found a very, very rare plant in Faroes, a bell flower – 20 plants in one small spot.”

“Many times, it went the same. There is a lot that people on the islands know. It’s incredible.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Epilogue

Less than 24 hours after our encounter, I received an email from Eyðfinn. Subject line: “Færøenes hvide hare ??” (“The white hare of the Faroes ??”).

He works a lot with Jens-Kjeld, Eyðfinn wrote. He had mentioned the 1924 painting to him right away.

The last ‘winter white’ hare was documented to have been shot in the winter 1916/17, he wrote, approximately 60 years after they were translocated to the Faroe Islands.1 Whether I could send him the painting I had shown to Jens-Kjeld, he asked.

An hour later, my phone rang.

“No no,” Eyðfinn said. “It’s already Norwegian one.”

No big coup today. But a reminder of the unexpected questions these paintings can still raise.

References

1

See Danmarks natur, vol. 12: Færøerne, ed. Arne Nørrevang, Copenhagen 1982, p. 117: ”... og den sidste hvide hare, vi har helt sikker vidnesbyrdet om, blev skudt vinteren 1916-17.”

I am grateful to Eyðfinnur Magnussen for the reference.

---

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.

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 had 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 article 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.

(Click here to jump directly to the List of Paintings)

During his nine-month stay on the Faroe Islands, the Swedish painter William Gislander produced approximately 100 works, depicting land- and seascapes as well as the islands’ wildlife.

In July 1924, Gislander had a first exhibition during Ólavsøka festival. Around 20 paintings were already sold before he left the islands in September. Around 60 were shown at a further 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, this moment that made them visible in art has remained a blind spot (see the introductory article here).

Tracing the Pieces of the Puzzle – Overview

• So far, 18 of these 100 paintings could be located. You can read about encounters with some of these paintings here. A separate list of these works is in preparation.

  • 12 of these paintings are kept in private collections (from these works, 2 are currently for sale)

  • 6 could be traced in public ownership
    (identified so far: Danish Parliament, Tórshavn Municipality, Listasavn)

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

• This leaves around 20 works for which a first trace still has to emerge

Invitation to Collaborate

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

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: 9 July 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, Landsbókasavnið Tórshavn.

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” [provisional 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” [provisional 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. “View from Fuglafjørður” [provisional title]

Oil on unknown material, 86 x 91 cm.

Sold on 8 December 2014 by Metropol Auktioner, untitled.

Thanks to Martin (who attended the Listsavn lecture) for his help in identifying the motif.

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

Oil on canvas, 85 x 115 cm.

Sold on 18 August 2024 by Skånes Auktionsverk.

14. “Coastal View with Nípufossur, near Norðradalur” [provisional title]

Oil on panel, 52.5 x 62 cm.

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

Thanks to Jens Dam Ziska, who pointed me in the right direction identifying this view.

15. “Agitated Sea around Kirkebønes” [provisional 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 Uncertain

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.