The Sea King's Queen

John Bauer

Watercolor, ink and gouache on paper, 32 cm, including frame 51 cm. Signed John Bauer. Executed 1909-1910. PROVENANCE Miss Yrsa Burmeister, Solna. Private collection, Sweden. EXHIBITIONS Cirkeln, Stockholm, "John Bauer Memorial Exhibition", 1919, cat. no. 1. Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, "John Bauer - Memorial Exhibition", 1934, cat. no. 152, listed as a replica of the illustration for the same fairy tale. Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, "Enchanted – John Bauer and the Magical Nature", 5 September 2020–23 May 2021, cat. no. 27. LITERATURE Illustration for Helena Nyblom's fairy tale "Agneta and the Sea King" from "Among Gnomes and Trolls" from 1910. In the printed book, a different version of the illustration was used for the coronation of Agneta. Harald Schiller, "John Bauer the Fairy Tale Illustrator", 1935, illustrated full-page in color, p. 136 and mentioned in text p. 136. Karin Sidén and Carina Rech (eds.), Enchanted – John Bauer and the Magical Nature, 2020, illustrated p. 276 and listed in the catalogue under cat. no. 27. The story of Agneta and the Sea King is a fairy tale about the meeting between human and nature spirit, where love is characterized by both beauty and melancholy, published in "Among Gnomes and Trolls" in 1910, compiled by Helena Nyblom. In the tale, Agneta lives a protected life at a castle by a lake, but one evening everything changes when the Sea King appears at the water's edge. Through cunning, he gets her to reach out her hand, and in the next moment she is pulled down into the depths, into his underwater kingdom. At first she is gripped by fear, but once she reaches the lake bed it disappears. In this new world, the Sea King appears in all his glory, as if his true beauty only becomes visible in his proper element. Agneta discovers that the world beneath the surface is both enchanting and alien, and soon she is bound to him through both love and wonder. He adorns her with a flower wreath and plays his harp, and through the music she gradually loses the memory of her former life. She becomes his bride, and together they live in a dreamlike existence. In the depictions, they often appear as a harmonious couple, mirroring each other in strong unity. But this enchantment is eventually broken. After having several children, Agneta one day hears the sound of church bells – a reminder of her human origin. The memory of her childhood suddenly returns, like an awakening from a dream. The Sea King agrees to take her back to land, on the promise that she will return before evening. When Agneta sees her father and the world she once belonged to again, however, she chooses to stay. She breaks her promise and leaves the Sea King behind in loneliness together with their children. In the final scene, a clear contrast appears: Agneta has returned to the human community, while the Sea King remains outside, alien and powerless. The fairy tale can be interpreted as a story about boundaries – between nature and culture, between the safe and the unknown. It contains both a warning against leaving the familiar and a depiction of longing beyond the given. At the same time, the story is characterized by strong visual and emotional expressions: Agneta is portrayed as an idealized figure, while the Sea King represents the free and powerful. Throughout the story, the movement of music and water runs as a symbol of their intense but fragile connection. The illustrations that accompany the tale begin with a work where Bauer can almost be said to have been inspired by Ernst Josephson's more naive painting, only to let the following images follow his more recognizable style. In the present work, the Sea King crowns Agneta with a crown of water lilies: "Now you shall be my queen and live here with me forever. - Will you, little Agneta? Yes, yes! she cried and stretched out her arms. Then the Sea King tied a wreath of large white water lilies and placed it on Agneta's hair, and from that moment she was the Sea King's queen." Agneta's attire and the depiction in profile carry strong influences of the Renaissance painting that Bauer encountered and fell in love with during his time in Italy. In his book about the artist, Harald Schiller writes: "Whether she, like Agneta in Helena Nyblom's fairy tale 'Agneta and the Sea King', has short hair covered by a small Renaissance hood or flowing long hair like Alvsol in Ester Edqvist's 'The Black Giant and the Holy Candlestick', she is a late-born relative of Ghirlandaio's and Botticelli's blonde and slender maidens... But not only the fairy tale princess has been given a Renaissance character, whether she prays by a flaming candle in a church or speaks on the seabed with the Sea King, the fairy tale prince has also become a Florentine youth, in style and form a parallel to the princess. Even when Bauer gives them ancient Nordic costumes, jewelry and weapons, he lets them remain children of the early Renaissance art. Thus, Bauer's fairy tale world has found the figures that would continue to dominate it."