真冬の生贄

Larsson meant this to be his masterpiece, a huge scene for the main staircase of Sweden's National Museum, showing the legendary king Domalde offering himself in sacrifice to end a famine. He worked on it for years, and in 1915 the museum's board rejected it after a debate that reached the government. By then the deliberately archaic style looked old-fashioned to a generation turning toward modern art, and the subject of a royal blood-sacrifice struck many as crude. Larsson took the refusal hard, and it shadowed his last years. He died in 1919 still stung by it. The painting stayed in private hands until 1997, when the museum finally bought it and hung it on the wall he had designed it for.