Agnes Cleve grew up in an affluent bourgeois environment in Uppsala, where her father held a professorship in chemistry. After completing her studies at the Higher School of Industrial Art (now Konstfack) in Stockholm, Cleve worked as a designer, producing works characterised by the prevailing Art Nouveau style and its ornate, decorative expression.

At the turn of the twentieth century, however, Cleve abandoned the applied arts in favour of traditional painting. She began studying under Carl Wilhelmson at the Valand School of Art in Gothenburg. Her works from this period reveal clear traces of Wilhelmson’s influence, which is said to have extended far beyond purely artistic matters. According to surviving letters from the time, an intense love affair developed between teacher and pupil. Wilhelmson’s marriage came close to dissolution, and Cleve left her then husband.

It was, however, the artist John Jon-And, thirteen years her junior, whom Cleve would marry. They met in the early 1910s, travelled to Paris together and married in 1915. Her stay in Paris marked a radical new direction in Cleve’s artistic development. Cubism was in vogue, and Cleve and Jon-And were early to seek inspiration and instruction at the very centre of the art world: Paris. Their teachers at La Palette were Le Fauconnier and Dunoyer de Ségonzak.

Agnes Cleve was one of the few female artists to join the Swedish avant-garde in Paris. She was something of a solitary figure who worked independently and rarely exhibited on her own, but her talent and technical skill were unmistakable. When Cleve and Jon-And returned to Sweden in 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, the foundations had been laid for these two remarkable artistic careers. Throughout the remainder of the 1910s, both Cleve and Jon-And adhered to a dynamic style of painting characterised by a fusion of Expressionism and Cubism, with cityscapes and landscapes alternating in Cleve’s production during these years.