Tapestry 'Näckens Bröllop'

Designed by Pär Axel Olsson

Sweden, 1906

“Näckens bröllop” is a rare and striking early 20th-century Swedish flat-woven tapestry, by Pär Axel Olsson and executed in rölakan at Kulturens Konstslöjdsanstalt in Lund in 1906. The composition captures a dramatic moment from the Nordic folk ballad of the Neck and the maiden: a chariot drawn by a black and a white horse cuts across a luminous evening sky, its passengers swept into a world of enchantment.

Olsson translates this narrative into a highly modern textile language. The horses, carriage and figures are rendered as elongated, almost pixel-like bands of colour that streak horizontally across the field, suggesting intense speed and a sense of fate in motion. Below, a stylised landscape of fields, buildings and distant silhouettes anchors the scene, while the sky shifts from deep blues to soft peach and grey, evoking twilight over the Scandinavian countryside.

The tapestry exemplifies the ambition of Swedish Arts and Crafts textiles at the turn of the century, where folk poetry, symbolism and contemporary design thinking meet. Comparable examples are held in museum collections, underscoring the importance of “Näckens bröllop” as both a work of narrative art and a masterpiece of Swedish flat-weave craftsmanship.

Signed PAO 19K&L06