Peter Nicolai Arbo

His most famous canvas is a stampede across the night sky. In Åsgårdsreien, painted in 1872, the god Odin and a host of ghostly riders and valkyries surge through storm clouds, a scene from an old Nordic belief in a spectral hunt that rode the winter air. Arbo took the subject from a poem by the Norwegian writer Johan Sebastian Welhaven, and worked it up during a stay in Paris.

That setting matters. Arbo had trained at the academy in Düsseldorf, the German school where a generation of Norwegian painters learned their craft, and he carried its polished, dramatic manner into a subject that was pointedly Norwegian. In the 1870s Norway was still tied to Sweden in a union many wanted out of, and painters were digging into Norse myth to give the country a past of its own. A gallop of pagan gods was one answer to the question of what a Norwegian picture should look like.

Arbo kept returning to that world, painting valkyries on horseback more than once and figures from the sagas in the same theatrical light. The Wild Hunt of Odin now hangs in the National Museum in Oslo, a canvas nearly two and a half metres wide.