Charles Portin

Two years ago, Crafoord Auctions Stockholm had the privilege of presenting a truly sensational discovery - the previously completely unknown artistic legacy of Francois Portin. A collection of his never-before-seen works suddenly emerged from a box donated to Myrorna in Ropsten, Stockholm, leading to a highly successful and widely publicized auction.
With provenance from the artist's family, Crafoord Auctions Stockholm can now, with unabashed pride, present a closely related auction theme - 39 works executed by Francois Portin's father, Charles Portin. It is highly unusual to offer a collection of 39 works that have never before been on the market. Most of them have been stored unframed in folders at the family's home.
The collection includes varied watercolors and oils: concrete images, landscapes, and figure scenes; motifs from Italy and the Swedish mountain world, among others. Unlike his son Francois, Charles Portin was an established artist. He made a remarkable life journey that took him from his upbringing in the small village of Mattila just north of Haparanda to becoming a groundbreaking artist whose works reached as far as India.
Charles Portin (originally Karl Peter Portin, 1889-1980) studied at the Ateneum Drawing School in Helsinki before traveling to Germany in 1910 for further studies at the Dresden Kunstschule under Guido Richter and at the Weimar Art Academy. After the outbreak of World War I, Portin returned home to Mattila where he focused on painting portraits and landscapes with charcoal, oil, and pastel colors.
Between the two world wars, he settled in Paris where he started a family, worked as a caretaker at a museum, and developed as an artist under the guidance of, among others, Fernand Léger and Marcel Gromaire. The last 40 years of his life were spent alternately in Haparanda, Stockholm, and Helsingborg.
In 1947, Portin returned to Paris to find new inspiration and was greatly influenced by the new abstract way of painting. He himself became a pioneer in Sweden and internationally known for his non-figurative paintings from the 1940s onwards, and later also for his lyrical-avant-garde landscape motifs from the Lapland mountains.
Charles Portin is considered the first artistically trained painter from Norrbotten. In addition to Sweden, he exhibited in France, Italy, Egypt, India, and the USA. The fact that he is represented today in everything from the library in Haparanda and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm to the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome and the Cairo State Art Museum is a testament to his fantastic journey as an artist.
For us at Crafoord Auctions Stockholm, it is an outstanding opportunity to offer a generous collection of never-before-seen works, not only by Francois Portin but now also by his father, the well-known Charles Portin.