"All his life he searched for a painterly approach which would help him capture the underlying meaning of the Icelandic way of life, to say something about our temperament as well as our surroundings. He found watercolors and oils had mutual qualities, and tried to use their attributes to the fullest...

     Ásgrímur Jónsson's stylistic range is a large one. It goes from a romantic kind of realism to Post-Impressionism, which was influenced by Cézanne and Van Gogh, whose work Jónsson got to know on his travels in Europe... (He) was a complex artist, who belonged to two distinct historical periods and who in many ways was divided in his attitude to art. A romantic storyteller with a penchant for dramatic revelations, he was also an impressionistic observer of nature."

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     'Landscape from a High Lattitude', Edited by Julian Freeman, 1989, p.23.

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     Ásgrímur Jónsson was an Icelandic painter and one of the first in the country to make art a professional living. He was born on the farm Suðurkot in Rútsstaðahverfi in South Iceland in 1876. He studied at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen between 1900 and 1903. During that time he traveled to Germany and spent a year in Rome while regularly returning to Iceland in the summers to paint his landscapes. He moved back to Iceland in 1909, a time of prosperity, not least in the city, Reykjavík, and the towns along the coast which had grown rapidly.

     The subjects of his pictures were mostly the landscapes of his home country, particularly mountains. When Jónsson exhibited in Oslo in 1909–1910 he received praise in print from Christian Krogh, one of Norway’s best known painters at the time, for having, “captured such awesome grandeur and vastness in a his picture that men feel small when confronted with it”.

     Yet his artwork was not always easy for a traditional and Nationalistic Icelandic public to accept. Jónsson himself told a story of when he exhibited his Hekla painting in 1909: "I especially remember that one of the guests, a well known and educated man, ran furious with anger from the exhibition. He said that he had never seen such colours as were in my painting and insisted that they did not exist. I encountered this problem for years, that people did not always find it easy to accept colours that would now be thought a normal phenomenon in nature, and this reminds one of the story that no one noticed the London fog until Turner began to paint it."

    His painting style was similar to the French impressionists. Some of his pictures also illustrated Icelandic sagas and folk tales. He was also noted for his murals in various churches in Iceland.

     Jónsson influenced many prominent artists that followed in Iceland including Jóhannes S. Kjarval, Nína Tryggvadóttir and Jón Stefánsson. During his lifetime he was honored in many ways. He was made honorary professor at the University of Iceland and in 1933 made a Grand Knight of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon. He was also an honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts and made a Knight of Dannebrog First Class.

     Jónsson held more than 15 solo exhibitions and his works have been shown in more than 50 group exhibitions in Europe and America. A short time before his death he donated his house at No. 74, Bergstaðastræti, Reykjavík to the Icelandic Government along with all the paintings within. These consisted of 192 oil paintings and 277 watercolors together with a great number of unfinished pictures dating from various periods in his life.

     In 2013 the LÁ Art Museum in Hveragerdi held an exhibition of the artist's works entitled, "Time in the landscape - Ásgrímur Jónsson & Arngunnur Ýr". In 2020–2021 the Icelandic Art Center held the exhibition Ásgrímur Jónsson: Korriró og dillidó highlighting the artist's works of Icelandic folklore and fairy tales.
    His house and the many works within is now the "Ásgrímur Jónsson Collection", part of the National Gallery of Iceland. The National Gallery also has more than 1,000 works relating to folklore and fairy tales and Ásgrímur Jónsson’s sketchbooks containing 2,000 drawings. The artist is also represented in the Reykjavik Art Museum, ASÍ Art Museum (Ásmundarsalur), Kjarvalsstaðir Museum and the Hotel Holt art collection in Reykjavik.

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