The wood has remained a potent source of comfort, fuel, tools, transportation and many other usages throughout the history of humans. In fact, the mankind has always kept a dependence on wood as the most common substance for his many activities. But here are some who used wood as a medium of expressing their instinct of love, art and creativity. Axel Petersson Döderhultarn is one of them, the most famous Swedish wood carving artist.  Axel Petersson Döderhultarn was born on December 12 , 1868 in the parish of Döderhult, Sweden.

Since his childhood Döderhultarn had interest in whittling, and carving of wood figures. Apart from continuous discouragement from his family, his passion was never ended. His family forced him to immigrate to USA and to find some better source of earnings but he never gave up and continued his art work.  Till then nobody knew that Döderhultarn will become one day the best artist in Scandinavian flat-plane style of woodcarving.

In the early years of his wood carving career, Döderhultarn worked on figure carving and used to sell his figurines in the local market of Oskarshamn. These traditional wood carving figures were sold very cheap. After a while Döderhultarn started to work in a minimalist style, which ultimately became the reason of his world fame. In 1909,  Döderhultarn  got an opportunity to exhibit his art in an exhibition in Stockholm, where he got enormous response from the Swedish people. After that the Swedish museums began to purchase his creations and slowly his work was exhibited to whole of Europe and the United States.

Döderhultarn became a source of great inspiration to many other wood carving artists not only in Sweden but throughout the world. He is no doubt the best name in wood carving art of Sweden and nowadays Döderhultarn figure is generic term used for the carving of  small wood figures in the minimalist style.