Reindeer Man

Everyone, even an art critic, has his own way of valuing pictures. Nils Nilsson Skum, a Laplander, values them according to one rule-of-thumb: how many reindeer do they show? His own crayon drawings sometimes have hundreds. He figures that must be why three Swedish museums own them. It was not the reason that Manhattan’s Museum of Natural History put his pictures on exhibition last week. The Museum had found a primitive of the likes of upstate New York’s octogenarian painter “Grandma” Moses (TIME, Oct. 21, 1940).

Skum’s preoccupation with reindeer is not surprising. Throughout most of his 74 years he followed the herds from their summer pastures among the ice-capped mountains of northernmost Sweden to their winter grounds in the coastal forests. He pitched his tent in the snow and slept with his head pillowed on the red pompon of his cap. In his time he killed 28 bears (and innumerable wolves), which was enough in itself to bring Skum honor in his own country.

Skum never saw a pencil until he was ten, but when he did finally get his hands on one he knew just what to do with it; he had practiced drawing with a ski pole in the snow. Drawing came naturally to Skum: he had a photographic memory of the vast white landscapes he moved through and of the runty reindeer he moved after. And Skum always had an uncanny feeling for the one thing most artists have to learn from other people’s pictures—perspective. But until he got too old and fat to camp comfortably, Skum found little time to draw. He was in his 60s before the Swedish inspector of nomad schools (which supplies teachers to follow the Lapps) gave him the notion of writing and illustrating a book about Lapp life.

Entitled Same Sita (Lapp Village), the book was a best-seller in Sweden. Skum had a one-man show in Stockholm which sold out the first day. Looking like a squat, genial troll, Skum came down out of the wilderness to see the Big City. Said Skum: “Quite good to have been built by man.” Then he went back to God’s country and told his wife they were through living in tents; he had decided to build a two-room cottage where he could rest his 280 pounds during the long winter night and draw in comfort. Also, he had sampled civilization’s delights and now wanted to sit by a stove.