Nils von Dardel

Nils von Dardel's best-known painting shows a beautiful young man collapsing among elegant friends, one hand on his heart, pale as a corpse and lovely as a saint. He called it The Dying Dandy, painted it in 1918 in bright, undulating colour, and it reads as a portrait of vanity and of his own fragile, theatrical self. It hangs today in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and is one of the best-loved Swedish paintings of its century.

Dardel came from a Swedish family of some standing and trained at the academy in Stockholm, but Paris was where he belonged. He lived there through the 1910s and 1920s among the cosmopolitan avant-garde, painting the jazz age and its loosened manners in a jewel-like, faintly wicked style that owed something to Matisse.

He could not stay still. He sailed to Japan in 1917, later wandered through Latin America and Africa, and finally settled in New York, where his heart, never strong, gave out in 1943. Much of his work stayed in private hands, and his fame outside Sweden arrived largely after his death.