The Water Sprite

A lone figure sits in a moonlit stream playing his fiddle, water plants curling around him and the falls churning behind, and in the old folk belief the music is a lure that draws listeners down into the water. Ernst Josephson worked on the motif for years, gripped by the Norwegian mountain landscape he had travelled through, and he seems to have identified with the water sprite as an image of the artist who creates alone, outside the community. He made several versions: the museum declined one of them in the 1890s and Prince Eugen bought it, another hangs in Gothenburg, and the canvas here was acquired in 1915 with a contribution from the Friends of the Nationalmuseum. Its charged atmosphere and unconventional handling shocked its first audiences, and the picture has since become the central work of Swedish national Romantic painting. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.