Press release -
Gift honours Crown Princess in 40th birthday year
To mark the 40th birthday of HRH Crown Princess Victoria, the Friends of Nationalmuseum have presented the National Portrait Collection at Gripsholm Castle with a photographic portrait by Thron Ullberg depicting the princess in one of her favourite settings, the Gustav III Pavilion at Haga.
The Crown Princess is portrayed in her role as heir to the throne, her gaze set firmly on the future. Thron Ullberg (born 1969) is one of Sweden’s leading portrait photographers. He started out studying fine art but soon turned his attention to photography. Ullberg often works with a large-format camera and conventional negatives, which he then manipulates digitally, being a devotee of the craft of traditional photography.
His portraits are consciously staged, with specific image-related associations and a theatrical character inspired by advertising and fashion photography as well as film and video. Ullberg’s works blend intimacy with distance, reflecting both the personal and the official side of the subject. Many of these characteristics are apparent in the portrait of Crown Princess Victoria.
At a ceremony at Gripsholm Castle on 8 November, Nationalmuseum and the Friends of Nationalmuseum jointly presented a copy of the portrait to HRH Crown Princess Victoria.
National Portrait Collection
Since 1822 Gripsholm Castle has been home to the National Portrait Collection, the oldest of its kind in the world, which now comprises over 5,000 portraits of Swedish men and women. Nationalmuseum has managed the collection since 1881.
For more information contact
Magnus Olausson, Head of collections and research:
magnus.olausson@nationalmuseum.se, +46 8 5195 4371
Mattias Robertson, Press Officer:
press@nationalmuseum.se, +46 767 234632
Categories
Nationalmuseum is Sweden’s premier museum of art and design. The collections comprise older paintings, sculpture, drawings and graphic art, and applied art and design up to the present day. The museum building is currently under renovation and scheduled to open again in 2018. In the meantime, the museum will continue its activities through collaborations both in Sweden and abroad as well as temporary exhibitions at Nationalmuseum Design at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm. Nationalmuseum has partnerships with Svenska Dagbladet and the Grand Hôtel Stockholm.
