Carl Gustaf Hellqvist
1851–1890 · Sweden · Historical painting, Realism, Romanticism
The story
In the summer of 1361 the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag took Visby, the rich trading town on the Baltic island of Gotland. According to legend, he set up three large barrels in the market square and ordered the townspeople to fill them with silver, or the town would burn. Carl Gustaf Hellqvist painted that scene in Munich in 1882. The canvas won a gold medal in Vienna the same year and now hangs in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, still his best-known picture.
Hellqvist was born in 1851 in Kungsör, a small town west of Stockholm, and trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. A travelling scholarship took him abroad, and he settled in Munich in 1879. He made his name with dramatic episodes from Sweden's past, among them the death of the regent Sten Sture the Younger on the ice of Lake Mälaren.
He later taught at the academy in Berlin until severe headaches ended his career. From 1889 he was a patient in a mental hospital in Munich, and he died there in November 1890, aged 38.
