Ansgar Almquist
Kasper Ansgarius "Ansgar" Almquist was a Swedish sculptor, primarily of freestanding figural bronzes.
Early life and education
Born in Säby parish, now part of Tranås Municipality, to sales clerk Gustav Almquist and Augusta Åhman, Almquist was raised in the village of Åsen went to work for a furniture company when he was 14. In 1908 he began studying at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm; he continued in 1909 under the painter Carl Wilhelmson at Valand Academy in Gothenburg, and starting in 1910 in Paris, at the Académie Colarossi under Jean Antoine Injalbert and the École des Beaux-Arts. After the First World War, he returned to Europe in the 1920s on study tours in England, France, Germany and Italy.Career
Almquist established his studio in Stockholm. He received a number of commissions for public art, including for Stockholm City Hall, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, and the Stockholm Concert Hall, and also executed sculptures in wood for the interior of of the Holland America Line; Venus is now held by in Gothenburg. He exhibited frequently with the Swedish Association of Artists, and individually in Tranås in 1930 and in Norrköping in 1944. From 1931 to 1938 he taught at the Högre konstindustriella skolan in Stockholm and from 1945 at its successor, Konstfack.His life-size bronze Gångaren was part of the sculpture event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics.