B. J. O. Nordfeldt

Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt, better known as B.J.O. Nordfeldt, was a post-Impressionist and American Expressionist artist. Though widely recognized for his paintings, he was also a prolific printmaker and often turned to other media for his work. His subject matter was varied, including still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and religious scenes among others.

The artist was born in Tullstrop, Skåne, Sweden in 1878 but immigrated to Chicago, Illinois with his family in 1891. When he was 21, Nordfeldt enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago but was recruited within a year to work with artist Albert Herter on a mural commissioned by the McCormick Harvester Company. The following year the company sent the young painter to the 1900 Paris Exposition to see the finished mural installed. While in France, he briefly enrolled in the Académie Julien, but left soon after for England where he studied wood-block printing at Oxford. He then left to spend a year in Sweden and finally returned home to Chicago in 1903 where he opened a studio and made many wood-block prints, paintings, and etchings.

Over the next 10 years Nordfeldt travelled across Europe and lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Santa Fe, New Mexico, painting and being commissioned to create portraits. During WWI, he was in San Francisco supervising the camouflage of merchatn ships. He moved to Santa Fe in 1919 and lived there for 20 years. While there, he gradually became less interested in printmaking and began to change his style and color palette from the mild hues of post-Impressionism to the strong, bright colors of New Mexico in a mix of Realism and Expressionism.

In 1937 Nordfeldt relocated once more from Santa Fe to Lambertville, New Jersey.