Like a line of flowing poetry, the heading Lagercrantzar and Vanadis frames a theme of quite singular character. We visit Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla, where the auction house’s knowledgeable Anders Svensson offers us a story that travels across seas, trade with distant cultures, and the world of researchers and explorers:”The Vanadis Expedition was a Swedish circumnavigation of the globe between 1883 and 1885, and a major national project with diplomatic, scientific, economic and military objectives. As such, it is representative of how many other expeditions – large and small – were conducted across the Western world at this time. With a carefully selected crew, they set out into the world to explore, forge trade connections and acquire objects.

Among the party were of course naval officers, but also an archaeologist, an ethnographer, a photographer and a Swedish prince. The archaeologist and ethnologist was Hjalmar Stolpe (1841–1905), perhaps best known as the excavator of Birka in the late 19th century. In 1877, Swedish enthusiasts put forward the idea of an ethnographic museum in Stockholm. The project was still in its infancy in the early 1880s when the Vanadis Expedition set sail on the world’s oceans. Hjalmar Stolpe, who was involved in the project, took his assignment to collect objects for a future Swedish ethnographic museum extremely seriously, and as a Vanadis traveller together with photographer O B Ekholm, over 7,000 objects were collected and 700 glass plates documented the voyage and its acquisitions. The majority of these objects, along with the glass plates, are today held at the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm.Other members of the crew also collected objects privately and on a considerably smaller scale to bring back to Sweden. Among these was the then lieutenant Gustaf Lagercrantz (1856–1926), and it is his objects – passed down in direct descent to the current owner – that feature in the themed auction “Lagercrantzar och Vanadis”.