Village incendié

In 1879 Albert Edelfelt was a young Finnish painter trying to make his name in Paris, and he did it with a scene from home that was almost 300 years old. He painted a peasant family fleeing a village that soldiers have burned, an episode from the Cudgel War, a Finnish peasant uprising of the 1590s against the crown. The Salon praised the realism of the figures, but Edelfelt himself was uneasy. He felt the invented historical people sat awkwardly in a landscape painted from real outdoor light, and wrote that the trouble with historical subjects is that you cannot give them the truth of a scene you have witnessed yourself. It was his first real success, and it turned him toward the everyday Finnish subjects he is remembered for.