Sven Richard Bergh was born in Stockholm at the end of 1858. He was the son of the Johan Edvard Bergh, who formerly spent time as a lawyer before devoting his life to his landscape painting and becoming an art teacher. His mother was also an artist and so their son was introduced to art at a very early age.
The family were wealthy and mixed with the cultural elite of Stockholm. Bergh studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm.
He travelled on many occasions to France, often to escape the exacting academicism of that art establishment, where he visited the artist’s colony at Grez-sur-Loing just south of Fontainebleau. The colony was modelled on another famous Parisian artist colony at Barbizon, which was set up some thirty years earlier.