Ellinor Taube was an artist who both painted and drew. Her father, the ballad-singer Evert Taube, immortalised her in several of his songs.

Ellinor Taube was born in 1930 within the Hedvig Eleonora congregation in Stockholm. She was brought up in an extremely artistic environment. Her parents were the author and poet Evert Taube and the sculptor Astri Taube. She had two brothers: Sven Bertil Taube, an actor and entertainer, and Per-Evert Taube, an architect. The fourth sibling, Rosemarie, died in 1928 when she was just two weeks old. Two of Ellinor’s paternal aunts were also artists: Karin Parrow, the painter, and Märta Taube-Ivarson, the sculptor.

When Ellinor Taube was 20 years old she married Bengt Ericson who was himself a painter and a sculptor. Together they had a daughter called Maria Taube, who has been working as a curator and visual arts educator at the Moderna museum in Stockholm for the last few years.

During the 1950s Ellinor Taube studied variously at the Otte Sköld painting school (now known as the Pernby painting school) in Stockholm, the Gerlesborg school in Hamburgsund in Bohuslän, and Kungliga Konsthögskolan (the royal college of art) in Stockholm. She mainly produced oil paintings and charcoal and ink drawings, which mainly included landscapes, still-lives, and portraits.

In 1962 Ellinor Taube was part of a group exhibition along with five academy students in Lomma, Scania. She received favourable reviews for her work. The Arbetet newspaper highlighted her feeling for traditional landscapes while Sydsvenska Dagbladet pointed out that her “robust drawings of boulders and twigs are reminiscent of a naïve approach to realism”. Ellinor Taube also held exhibitions together with her mother Astri, as well as other other artists.

Ellinor Taube appears as the central character in several of her father’s ballads, including “Ellinor dansar”. Perhaps the best-known of these much-loved songs is Evert Taube’s “Brevet från Lillan” or “Pappa kom hem” from 1935. The song recounts that Ellinor is sitting in the shed at the family farm of Sjösala, missing her dad who is away travelling in San Remo. Evert Taube’s book Detta är lilla Ellinors bok, which includes the song “Fiorella från Caramella”, is also dedicated to his daughter. Immediately after the end of the Second World War Ellinor Taube accompanied her father on a boat trip to the Caribbean and to Panama, documenting the journey through her paintings and drawings.

Ellinor Taube died in the Högalid parish of Stockholm in 1998. She was 68 years old.