Nils Kreuger

Nils Kreuger (1858–1930) was a Swedish landscape painter and a leading member of the Varberg School, an artists' colony on the Halland coast that developed a distinctive Swedish Synthetist-Symbolist landscape manner in the 1890s. Trained in Stockholm and Paris, Kreuger absorbed French Post-Impressionist ideas — especially the flattened decorative planes of the Pont-Aven painters and the broken touch of Neo-Impressionism — and applied them to the pastures, horses, and low skies of the Swedish west coast and the island of Öland.

Kreuger painted in a decorative, flattened manner with broken touch and muted greens, grays, and earth tones. His compositions emphasize horizontal bands of pasture, sky, and sea, often populated by single horses or cattle.

Kreuger established the Varberg School as a Swedish branch of late-nineteenth-century Synthetist landscape and prepared the ground for Swedish modernism.