Dancing Fairies

In Swedish popular belief the älvdans — the elf-dance, the fairy dance — was the pale mist that gathers over the meadows before sunrise, and the fairies themselves were held to be beings of largely evil power, dangerous to anyone who came near. August Malmström paints them on the ground at first light: girl-like figures, some sharply drawn, others already dissolving into the haze. Born in 1829 at Nubbekullen in Östergötland, the son of a carpenter and church-carver, he studied at the Stockholm academy, went to Düsseldorf in 1856 and then to Paris, and became professor of the academy in 1867 and its director from 1887 to 1893; he is remembered above all for illustrations to Frithiofs saga and Fänrik Ståls sägner and for his pictures of country childhood. The museum notes that Scandinavian popular belief played an important part in the attempt to build a national art less dependent on countries such as France, and this picture is that programme at its most lyrical. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.