The life of Albert Johnson, who described himself simply as a house painer of no particular merit, provided a tragic footnote for the cultural annals of Swedish Jamestown with his untimely death on February 1, 1931. Johnson was in fact an untutored artist of extraordinary talent whose finest waork - a galaxy of Swedish historical murals painted for the plush new quaters of the Norden Club in 1914 - disappeared in 1958 when the beautiful structure on East Second Street was razed to make way for a new post office.
Albert Johnson was 21 when he left Sweden in 1891 to seek his fortune in the United States. He sensed his remarkable skill as a painter, but never had the benefit of formal training and refused to call himself an artist. He was much sought after as a decorator and house painter and left the mark of his talent on the walls of many Jamestown buildings.
Johnson's Norden Club master work was a heroic concept of Leif Ericsson's landing on Vinland which covered the entire rear wall of the auditorium stage. Scandanavian landscapes, born of Johnson's nastalgia, hung in every room of the club's splendid quarters.
For some time before his death Johnson lived alone in a room in the old Allen block on the present site of the West Second Street parking ramp. HIs pathetic addiction to alcohol had led to the estrangement from his wife 20 years earlier. HIs room was crowded with paintings created for his own diversion. These and others he produced for friends are presumably in private hands.
Two friends received no response when they rapped on his door several times on Saturday evening, January 31, 1931. When he again failed to respond the next morning, they decided to search for him in the wooded northeast corner of Falconer - near the present ecumenical campus - where he frequently sought communion with nature. There they found him, under a mantle of snow.