Focusing on Swedish paintings in Luminous Modernism, scholar Michelle Facos and collector David Werner will discuss the role played by landscape painting in forging a collective Swedish identity circa 1900 and the appeal of Swedish landscape painting for collectors then and now.

Michelle Facos is Professor of the History of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is an internationally-recognized expert on Swedish painting and has taught Scandinavian art at Växjö University and Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University in Greifswald, Germany. A contributor to the Luminous Modernism catalogue, her book Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s (1998) investigates Swedish nature, nationalism, and art in the years around 1900, and her books Symbolist Art in Context (2009) and An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art (2011) incorporate Scandinavian art into mainstream European movements.

David Werner is a practicing ophthalmologist with a sub specialty in pediatric ophthalmology. He has been a collector of Scandinavian art for the last fifteen years with an emphasis on both the decorative and fine arts from 1880 to 1920. He is president of the advisory board for the Palmer Museum of Art in State College, Pennsylvania and is on the board of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has also lectured on Scandinavian art for Crystal Cruises.