En bonadsmålare och hans värld. Johannes Nilsson i Breared

Sammanfattning: The aim of this dissertation is to find relationships between folk art, an artist's personal life and influential factors originating in the context. Christmas wall hangings by the peasant painter Johannes Nilsson (1757­1827) are the focus of the study. The fact that he had a special approach to the painting tradition raises two questions: Why did he paint the way he did? How can his hangings be interpreted? Theoretically, the hangings are treated as communicative. In the peasant environment, motif could be interpreted without the restraints of the iconography of fine arts. I regard the hangings as texts whose interpretation depends on the readers¹ background with respect to tradition, knowledge, context, ideology, and world view. In interpreting the originator's intention several perspectives are used: a biographical one involving his personal life, a contextual one involving tradition, religious ideas and world views of the time, and a genre perspective involving the art. Sources of information for historical reconstruction are added to the information found in the structure and style of the hangings.Being a man belonging to the class of peasants, Johannes Nilsson¹s personal records are brief. All the same, it has been possible to create a close-up view of his life. His professional development came late in his life, although he was very talented. He never married and he was perhaps the only person to make his living solely by producing wall hangings. Accounting for these incompatibilities is the fact that he suffered from epilepsy. He never learnt to read well enough to be a registered reader in the records, although he had great knowledge of the Gospel and knew how to write simple texts. The physical world around Johannes Nilsson was the parish of Breared in the province of Halland and the wide area where his hangings were in demand. Traces of the Breared context are found in his paintings. It was not a community of readers as many of the parishioners were illiterate like Johannes Nilsson. Therefore they preferred feast motifs and unsophisticated narratives of oral character. However, although Johannes Nilsson painted many of this kind of hangings, these were not the type of motifs that he himself preferred. His mental world was occupied with religious problems and he was influenced by revivalist ideas. The logic in his hangings points to the existence of of groups where these ideas could be spread, although there are no traces of such groups in th e material.Thus Johannes Nilsson used a traditional picture genre for preaching and edification in order to make people better prepared for eternal life. An analysis of the genre demonstrates that he made use of its inherent interpretive structures (the syntax) and that he made his main changes in the style of the hangings (the morphology). In so doing, he used the genre as a language to formulate new texts.