Gustaf Cederström

Gustaf Cederström is remembered above all for one painting, made in Paris in the late 1870s: a long line of Swedish soldiers carrying the body of their dead king through the snow. The king is Charles XII, the warrior monarch shot dead at a siege in Norway in 1718, and the picture shows his soldiers bearing him home across the winter mountains.

Cederström wanted it to look true, so he staged every part of it. He set up a real stretcher outdoors and had an Italian model lie on it as the dead king. The wounded man with the bandaged head was the painter's own brother, and his six-year-old daughter posed for the drummer boy at the front.

The real king was carried home in a coffin on a wagon. The solemn open bier and the winding column of grieving troops were Cederström's invention. A second version, which he painted in 1884, hangs in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.