Sigurd Skou was born in Norway and studied with Anders Zorn in Stockholm and Paris. Throughout his career he traveled extensively and truly lived the artists life staying active in artistic circles in New York, France and Chicago. When Skou came to New York around 1916, was the founder of the Grand Central Art Galleries and began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design, The National Arts Club and being represented by the most prestigious gallery of its time, The Milch Galleries. He won numerous awards including the Allied Artists of America gold medal and the Salamungundi Club’s Foster Prize.

Skou also spent many summers in France studying there earlier in his career and working with many American artists along the Brittany Coast in the village of Concarneau. He and his colleagues were drawn to color and beauty which inspired many of the greatest French Impressionist and Post Impressionist painters who also lived and worked in that region at the same time. Skou also experimented with techniques in which color was applied with great freedom and imagination. He often used palette knife to apply paint, dabs of color at a time. Here he has also experimented with scratching into the wet paint to create a textured effect. In a 1926 essay, novelist Edgar Lee Masters praised the “honesty, strength and joy of life” he found in Skou’s powerful paintings.

It is a tragedy that Skou died of cancer at the American Hospital in Paris in 1929 at the age of 54. The bulk of his paintings were left to his New York dealer, The Milch Galleries. As one can see by the artists exhibition history and memberships one can only imagine his affiliations and friendships he had with a vast cast of characters in the art world during an extremely important time in American art.