Mårten Eskil Winge

In 1872 crowds queued for hours inside the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm to see one new painting. It was Mårten Eskil Winge's Thor's Fight with the Giants — the red-bearded thunder god in his goat-drawn chariot, swinging his hammer Mjölnir wreathed in lightning against the looming giants of Norse myth. King Charles XV bought it, died that same year, and left it to the museum, where the huge canvas still hangs.

Winge had loved the Old Norse sagas since boyhood, and his drawings on those themes had drawn notice while he was still a student. His timing helped: he worked amid a Swedish national movement that reached for Viking gods and legends as emblems of the country, and Thor gave that feeling a face.

Trained in the German-influenced Düsseldorf manner and later a professor at the Stockholm academy, Winge kept returning to the myths. The Thor picture is the one that outlived him, reprinted so often that it is close to how many Swedes still imagine the god.