About
Urban Larsson is an oil painter in the figurative tradition. Striving for beauty and universal human values, he paints only from life. He was born in 1966 in Stockholm and has lived and worked in Amsterdam for nearly three decades. The artist studied History of Art at the University of Stockholm and one year of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
Larsson then moved to Florence, Italy to train at Studio Cecil & Graves, the only atelier in Europe where traditional realism was taught. He spent nearly three years there, learning drawing and painting and being introduced to the visual language and techniques of the masters. After his studies in Florence, he moved to Amsterdam to settle as a painter. An essential part of his visual philosophy and approach is sight-size, a tradition that has evolved over the centuries whereby the canvas is placed alongside the subject and viewed from a distance; the painter works standing and repeatedly steps back from the canvas in order to convey the visual impression of the whole.
Urban’s prestigious and numerous portrait commissions are international. He has for example painted the official portrait of HM Queen Silvia of Sweden and King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands. What sets Larsson apart from most other painters is that he also masters other genres, such as still-lifes, landscapes and figures. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and USA. In 2017 he had two retrospective exhibitions in prominent museums in Sweden and the Netherlands. That same year a two part documentary on his work was broadcast on Dutch national television AVRO.
Since April 2007 he has painted in the former studio of G.H. Breitner (1857-1923) on Prinseneiland, Amsterdam. Larsson also regularly teaches portraiture to the the advanced students at Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy. Urban Larsson is married to art restorer Lara van Wassenaer and they have three children.