Jacob Heinrich Elbfas

In Storkyrkan, Stockholm's cathedral, hangs a panel showing the city on a spring morning in 1535, with rings of light and false suns flaring above the rooftops. It copies the oldest known picture of Stockholm, and for a long time it was taken for that lost original. The copy was painted in 1636 by Jacob Heinrich Elbfas and is believed to follow the original closely.

Elbfas was a Baltic German, born in Livonia around 1600 and trained in Strasbourg. He settled in Sweden in 1622 and in Stockholm in 1628, where he became a master in the painters' guild. From 1634 to 1640 he was court painter to Queen Maria Eleonora, widow of King Gustavus Adolphus, and he portrayed many Swedish nobles, among them the chancellor Axel Oxenstierna. His standing faded in the 1640s, when Queen Christina brought in a new generation of painters, and he died in Stockholm in 1664.