August Malmström

August Malmström came from about as far from the art world as a Swedish boy could start. He was born in 1829 into a poor family in the province of Östergötland, and his father, a wood carver, spent what little he had to send the talented boy to the Stockholm academy. Malmström studied on, worked in Düsseldorf and travelled twice to Italy, and eventually became a professor at the academy that had once admitted the carver's son.

His subjects were often drawn from the older Sweden, Norse legend, peasant children, and the spirits that country people believed lived in the landscape. His most famous painting, from 1866, is called Dancing Fairies. It shows a ring of pale elf-maidens whirling in a mist over water in the last light of a summer night, the kind of scene folk tales placed around burial mounds and forest pools.

It hangs in the National Museum in Stockholm and has been reproduced so often in Sweden that many people know the image long before they learn who painted it.