Isaac Grünewald

Swedish Isaac Grünewald was a painter, graphic artist and stage designer. He exhibited as a teenager and then studied in Stockholm and Paris. In the ensuing years longer stays in France followed. After his return to Sweden, he became known for pioneering stage sets for the Stockholm Opera, also creating more stage sets for the operas in Paris and Copenhagen. The 1920s he spent continuously in Paris again, before becoming professor at the Stockholm School of Art, eventually founding a painting school.

Grünewald was a highly productive painter as well as a writer and public speaker. During his lifetime he was one of the most controversial Swedish artists, who was provocative in his colorful, expressionistic images, and was confrontational and quick-witted. The press criticized him constantly as an imitator of Matisse, but the audience loved him. In 1946, he and his second wife Märta Grundell were killed in a plane crash near Oslo.

Although there are few other paintings whose works are so numerous on the art market, there is none titled Swimmer After the Bath. Possibly it is one of the many beach scenes Grünewald painted in Skandinavia as well as in various Mediterranean countries. For instance, the color lithograph Persons on the beach of Alassio (in Swedish also as Efter) in the format 31 x 40 cm dates from about 1932, the year of his Olympic appearance.