The Fire at the Royal Palace, Stockholm, May 7th, 1697

On the night of 7 May 1697 the medieval castle of Tre Kronor, the seat of the Swedish kings since the thirteenth century, burned. The fire was discovered in the afternoon and spread through the night; the royal family was taken across the water to safety, the boy king Charles XII was fourteen years old, and the old castle with much of its archive was lost. The royal palace that stands on the site today was built afterwards. Johan Fredrik Höckert — born at Jönköping in 1826, trained at the Stockholm academy, then in Munich and Paris, where the Rembrandtesque depth of his Divine Service in the Lapp Chapel won a gold medal at the world exhibition of 1855 and was bought by the French state — spent the last years of his short life on this subject. It was shown almost finished at the Stockholm exhibition of 1866, met a great deal of criticism there, and entered the Nationalmuseum only in 1883, as a gift from anonymous donors together with contributions from the artist’s relatives. His death that September, at forty, cut off the career the picture had been meant to crown. The canvas is painted at night and almost entirely dark: the water and the town in shadow, the castle in flames and the firelight on the surface of the water. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.