The sculpture Vingarna

The sculpture Vingarna, or Gosse med örn, is a work by Carl Milles. It was composed in 1908 and executed in a larger scale in 1910. The sculpture depicts a naked youth on his knees on a stone block, lifting an eagle with outstretched wings on his raised arms. The sculpture is 270 centimeters high in its monumental version and is placed on a tall column of varying heights depending on the location.

This sculpture exists in several copies: outside the Art Museum in Göteborg at Götaplatsen, at Millesgården in Lidingö, and outside the museum on Strömkajen in Stockholm. The sculpture is also without a column in the garden of Uplands nation in Uppsala and at Waldemarsudde on Djurgården in Stockholm. The sculpture in Göteborg was donated in 1916 by Caroline Wijk, born Dickson, and was first placed without a column at Bastionsplatsen before being moved to Götaplatsen during the 1940s.

Milles also had a smaller variant of the sculpture cast in bronze at 60 centimeters at Herman Bergmans konstgjuteri in Stockholm. This bronze sculpture was then placed on a 110-centimeter-high mahogany pillar. In 1914, a villa was built at Korsvägen 9 in Äppelviken in Bromma. An exemplar of Carl Milles' sculpture Vingarna stood in the garden, and the villa was named Villa Vingarna. After the owner, civil assessor Waldemar Robert Ditzinger, died, he bequeathed the villa to the Swedish Writers' Union to be used as an honorary residence for a deserving fiction writer. This sculpture has since been moved from the garden in Äppelviken and is today located outside the museum on Strömkajen in Stockholm.

In 1916, Mauritz Stiller filmed the movie Vingarne. Stiller believed that a painting at the center of the action should be replaced with a more visual sculpture and chose Milles' sculpture Vingarna instead.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons