Oskar Emil Törnå

Oskar Emil Törnå (born in Kättilstad, Östergötland, 1842; died in Stockholm, 1894) was a Swedish landscape painter, illustrator and printmaker. Of French descent, he first trained in a trade before turning to art, helped by well-off neighbours who enabled him to enter the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts.

After a stay in Düsseldorf, which he later regarded as wasted time, he secured a travel scholarship in 1874 and settled in Paris. The Naturalist work he saw at the Salon, and his open-air painting around Montigny-sur-Loing and Marlotte, shaped his style. He exhibited at the Salon in 1877 and was praised by critic Louis Edmond Duranty. Back in Sweden he stood out by painting outdoors at a time when many landscapists still finished their canvases in the studio. The Academy bought several of his works for teaching, and his favourite subjects were the Stockholm archipelago, Södermanland and Östergötland.

In 1885 he briefly joined the Opponents, a group critical of Academy teaching, but left after judging the group counterproductive. By the late 1880s, ill health and resistance to new methods reduced the quality of his work. His pictures are held by the Göteborgs konstmuseum, the Nationalmuseum and the Nordiska museet, and his pupil Edvard Westman carried on the Swedish landscape tradition.