Birger sand zen biography of mahatma

SANDZÉN, SVEN BIRGER (1871-1954)

Sven Birger Sandzén was one of the premier landscape painters of the Great Plains during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Blidsberg, Sweden, on February 5, 1871, Sandzén left in 1894 for the small town of Lindsborg, Kansas, founded twenty-five years earlier by Swedish Lutherans.

There he intended to teach at Bethany College and pursue his art in the American West. As a student of drawing and painting in Stockholm and Paris, Sandzén valued the European tradition, but he was also eager to experience the liberating influence of the open prairies.

Over the next sixty years he produced an estimated 2,800 oil paintings, 400 watercolors, 330 prints, and 5,600 sketches.

Best known are the landscapes, whose thick, vigorously applied paint in vivid colors reveal Sandzén's passionate response to nature.

He was thrilled by the clear atmosphere and "glorious scenery" he found in Kansas, particularly the Smoky Hill River