Swedish artist who became the second long-term Saddle & Sirloin portraitist.
1866--1927 | Artist: Joseph Allworthy (1892-1991)
Impact & Accomplishments
Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Arvid Nyholm studied architecture and theatrical painting before shifting his focus to portrait and landscape painting. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and privately with Anders Zorn, one of Sweden’s most prominent artists. Nyholm immigrated to New York in 1891 and eventually settled in Chicago in 1903, where he exhibited regularly at the Art Institute and the Swedish Club.
Two significant independent commissions of his career were portraits of Minnesota governor Adolph Olson Eberhart (1917), in the state’s capitol building, and Swedish-American inventor and engineer John Ericsonn (1927), in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Nyholm became the second long-term Saddle & Sirloin portraitist, although few records remain to document this period of work. The dates of his employ and the total number of portraits he contributed is unknown, since records and works were lost in the fire, but two works by him are in the collection today, the portrait of Alvin Sanders and Nyholm’s own self-portrait, dated to 1922. His self-portrait was likely added to the collection sometime after his death in 1927.
Did You Know?
Untitled (Woman with Parasol), circa 1922
During the 1920s, commissions took Nyholm to New York and Philadelphia, while in Chicago he painted numerous portraits of the city’s meatpacking magnates for the Saddle and Sirloin Club. His solo exhibition at the O’Brien and Jacobus Galleries in Chicago in 1925 was enthusiastically received by critics. Nyholm’s reputation was at its height when the artist died of stomach cancer at age sixty-one.