Children's book – Trolle, Wichtel, Königskinder

Deepest experience of nature, a sure sense of style and an eye for the essential and archetypal come together in John Bauer's fairy-tale pictures and make them a deep experience of their own for young and old viewers alike. They remain unforgettable because in them one recognises, what the inner eye has ever and again conjured up: the great forest of fairy tales with its uncanny figures, the delicate beauty of a princess …

In his atmospheric Art Nouveau illustrations, John Bauer created, in the short span between 1907 and 1915, a fairy-tale world whose magic no generation of children in Sweden has been able to escape since. His clumsy trolls, grown out of tree stumps, mossy stones and conifers, often stupid-cunning and rough, sometimes also friendly, but always curious about the human world, his delicate princesses, his cheeky, brave boys driven into the world by a thirst for adventure, his kings or princes who wear their crowns with dignity and humility …

The fairy tales come from Swedish storytellers such as Elsa Beskow, Helena Nyblom, Anna Wahlenberg, Alfred Smedberg and many others who around 1900 committed themselves to a new kind of children's literature that was also meant to reach broad middle-class circles.