The museum reads the title as a signal rather than a description: the painting is a historical fantasy on the events of 1361, when Valdemar Atterdag’s Danish fleet descended on Gotland, and not an attempt to reconstruct them. The canvas is signed and dated 1894 and measures 122 × 209 cm; the museum keeps it in a frame of 127 × 214 × 4.5 cm.
Richard Bergh (1858–1919) was born in Stockholm, trained at the Royal Academy there and then in Paris, and in 1885 helped lead the artists’ protest against the Academy that took the name of the Opponents; he was a founding member of the Artists’ Association that grew out of it. From the 1890s he turned from the naturalism of his French years towards a symbolic and increasingly national landscape painting, and in 1915 he was appointed director of the Nationalmuseum, a post he held until his death in 1919. The work is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.