La caccia selvaggia di Odino

Arbo painted this storm of riders in Paris in 1872, a Norwegian abroad reaching back into his own country's old myths. The subject is the Wild Hunt, the Aasgaardsreien, a ghostly cavalcade that tears across the winter sky. Odin leads it on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir, with valkyries, ravens and armed dead swept along behind in the cloud. He took the idea from a poem by the Norwegian writer Johan Welhaven, who had put the old folk belief into verse a generation earlier. The National Gallery in Oslo bought the canvas the same year he finished it. Everything in it is motion, the cloaks and manes and spears all raked one way, so the whole crowd seems about to pour off the top edge of the frame.