John (Johnny) August Emanuel Roosval (29 August 1879 – 18 October 1965) was a Swedish art historian, Medieval ecclesiastical art specialist, and university professor.
Biography
Johnny Roosval was born in a bourgeois family in Kalmar, but grew up in Stockholm from the age of five and went to school there.
Education
He studied at Uppsala University from 1897, and finished his kandidat degree in philosophy, Latin, French, and Æsthetics with the history of literature and art, and Scandinavian philology in two years.
In 1899 he went to Berlin as a tutor for the son of the Swedish military attaché there, Henrik de Maré. The son, Rolf de Maré, later became known as an art collector and as the owner of the Ballets Suédois. Henrik de Maré's wife, sculptor Ellen von Hallwyl, would later divorce him and married Johnny Roosval in 1907.
At the same time, he enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he was a student of Heinrich Wölfflin and Adolph Goldschmidt, two of the founders of art history as an academic discipline. Roosval joined Goldschmidt on bicycle tours of rural churches in the vicinities of Berlin, a method for art historical exploration he would later introduce to his Swedish students. He was awarded his Berlin Dr. phil. degree in 1903 for a dissertation on Flemish altarpieces in Sweden.
