Nordic art and design books worth owning
Five Nordic art and design books worth living with, from the single-volume survey to the warm, browsable end of the shelf, and where the prints on your wall fit in.
A print on the wall and a good book on the table do much the same job. Both slow you down and ask you to look properly. So if you love the work we sell, here are a few Nordic art and design books worth living with, the ones that reward a second and third read. This list opened what's since grown into a six-part series, and it's still the place to start.
The best Nordic art books to start with
Start broad. Art of the Nordic Nations by Serge Fauchereau (Thames & Hudson, 2025) is about the closest thing to a single-volume survey of the region's art in the years it found its voice, 1870 to 1950, and it's the one to reach for when you want to understand why Nordic art looks the way it does: the long northern light, the quiet interiors, the pull between clarity and melancholy that runs through so much of it.
From there, follow the light to the painters themselves. Vilhelm Hammershøi built a whole career out of empty rooms and grey Copenhagen daylight, and once you've sat with his interiors you start noticing that calm everywhere. Harald Sohlberg and Harriet Backer gave the Norwegian landscape and the lamplit room the same still attention. Munch you already know, but he repays a proper monograph rather than a fridge magnet of The Scream. When one of these painters asks for a closer look, we've picked out six Nordic artist monographs worth living with.
Which Scandinavian design books are worth owning?
Then there's design, which in the Nordic countries was never really treated as separate from art. Scandinavian Home by Elizabeth Wilhide is a clear, country-by-country guide to the mid-century furniture and interiors the region is famous for. New Nordic Houses by Dominic Bradbury carries that instinct into the present, all cabins in the woods and coastal retreats, shot beautifully enough to frame.
If you want the feeling more than the history, North: How to Live Scandinavian by Brontë Aurell and The Monocle Book of the Nordics sit at the warmer, browsable end of the shelf: design, food and the small habits that make the region what it is.
Where the series goes next
None of these will teach you to make art, and that's not why you own them. They train the eye. A few evenings with Hammershøi's rooms and you start choosing what goes on your own walls a little more carefully.
This first list stays deliberately short and broad, and the rest of the series does the digging. The four newest instalments each pull one strand off the shelf: Nordic design and architecture books, craft books on glass, ceramics and textiles, Nordic photography books and contemporary Nordic art books on the artists working right now.
Which is where we come in. The prints we carry come from the same Nordic sensibility these books trace, the same light, the same restraint, the same quiet confidence. If a book sends you looking for a piece to live with, browse our Scandinavian art prints, and if you'd rather meet the people making that work now, our artists are here.
