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He studies at the Stockholm Royal Academy of Arts from 1908 to 1910. He moves to Paris in 1910, and remains there most of the time until 1939. While in Paris, he travels to North Africa, Japan, Peru and Mexico. In 1940, he leaves for New York via Cuba.
His life in Paris is hectic and bohemian and dandy-like; he makes friends with a fellow Swede, Rolf de Maré, who is well-off and would later create the Ballets Suédois, for which Nols designs several sets. He meets with fellow artists in Montmartre and Montparnasse. In 1920, he gets secretly engaged to Nita Wallenberg. He marries Baroness Thora Klinkowström in 1921. She is a Swedish artist living in Paris as well. Modigliani made her portrait in 1918 (see below).
He tries several techniques of fellow painters: cubism (only briefly, see the Senlis "rue de Paris" below), fauvism with pure colours (see the "Black Diana"), surrealism. However, he is basically a figurative painter and produces numerous portraits, and — in the 1920s — burlesque scenes with multiple characters. In later years, he will return to a more traditional realism (see the Mexican portraits).
In the 1930s, Nils Dardel meets the writer Edita Morris (née Toll in Sweden) and shares his life — at least partially — with her until his death. One of several portraits of Edita is shown below.
Nils Dardel's paintings are shown in various museums in Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Oslo and Hamburg. His most famous work, "The Dying Dandy" was sold in 1984 for the sum of 3.4 million Swedish crowns, at the time the highest price paid for a painting by a Swedish artist. The record was broken in October 2012, when the painting "Waterfall" was sold for 25 million crowns (2.9 M€ or 3.7 M$). See both works below.
See also Nils von Dardel's timeline (PDF).