Dancing Fairies
Fairies dance in the mist over a meadow on a summer night. Malmström’s picture is one of the best known of Swedish National Romanticism and has been printed in countless schoolbooks.
The fairies almost merge with the mist – is it a dance or just a haze over the meadow?
August Malmström was born in 1829 and was one of the leading Swedish painters of the second half of the 19th century. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and then continued his studies abroad, in Paris among other places. He later became a professor at the Academy and taught a whole generation of Swedish artists. Dancing Fairies was painted in 1866 and now belongs to the Nationalmuseum. He was one of the artists who made Swedish folk poetry a central subject in painting.
The picture shows a meadow on a summer night. Mist rises from the grass, and in the mist dancing fairies float as light, pale figures. They are almost transparent and merge with the haze. The landscape is still and dim, and the light faint and cool.
The subject comes from Swedish folklore. Fairies were said to dance in the meadows on misty nights, especially around midsummer. They were beautiful but dangerous. Anyone who came too close might fall ill, and ailments such as rashes were called “elf-blown”. Malmström nevertheless makes the picture dreamy and poetic rather than frightening. Beliefs about fairies existed throughout the Nordic countries and survived in the countryside well into the 19th century.
Malmström was deeply interested in Nordic history and folk poetry. He illustrated Esaias Tegnér’s Frithiof’s Saga and painted many pictures from tales and legends. During the 19th century artists all over Europe searched for their own countries’ myths and stories. In Sweden the history and fairy-tale painting of the period was shaped by training in Düsseldorf, with careful draughtsmanship and dramatic subjects.
The picture is painted in oil on canvas. The light is soft and diffuse, and there is no sharp boundary between mist and fairies. The colours are muted, with green, grey and white. It is precisely this fluid uncertainty that gives the picture its feeling: are we seeing a dance or just mist moving over the meadow? The picture lies on the border between landscape painting and fairy-tale illustration.
Dancing Fairies became enormously popular. It was printed in schoolbooks, on cards and posters, and hung as a reproduction in many Swedish homes. In this way it shaped the image of the Swedish summer night and of folklore for several generations. Many Swedes encountered it in textbooks long before they saw the original in the museum.
Critics have sometimes regarded the picture as too sweet or sentimental, and during 20th-century modernism it was not particularly esteemed. But it has kept its place in the Swedish visual heritage. It is a clear example of how 19th-century art combined observation of nature, folk poetry and national identity. It also shows how close landscape painting and fairy tale could be in the 19th century, when nature was often depicted as animate.