Gustaf Adolf Sparre
Swedish art collector (1746-1794)
Count Gustaf Adolf Sparre (6 January 1746 – 18 June 1794) was a Swedish art collector. He travelled widely through Europe, collecting mostly Flemish and Dutch cabinet paintings. His collection of over 100 paintings is special because it remained largely intact for over two centuries.
Biography
Sparre was born on 6 January 1746, in Gothenburg. He was the wealthy son of the Marshal of the Court and the director of the Swedish East India Company (SOIC), Count Rutger Axel Sparre, and Sara Christina Sahlgren (1723–1766). His maternal great-uncle Niclas Sahlgren had been a founder of the SOIC. Gustaf Adolf Sparre studied as a teenager at Lund and Uppsala University and spent the years 1768–1771 making a Grand Tour abroad, visiting Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany. It was during these early travels that he began buying art. On his return he started work in his mother's family business that had been built up by her mother Brigitta Sahlgren and moved into the Sahlgrenska house named after her in Gothenburg, situated next to the SOIC headquarters. It was here where he first installed his art collection in the Gustavian floor. One of the original cabinet paintings in its Gustavian Sparre frame, gifted to the city of Gothenburg in 1981 by the Wachtmeister family trust, was hung in the Blue room of the newly restored Gustavian floor.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gustaf Adolf Sparre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.