Freja (1917 CE)

John Bauer’s Freja, completed in 1917, is a striking oil painting that presents the Norse goddess as both radiant and commanding, uniting sensual beauty with mythic power. Created for the aula of the Karlskrona girls’ school, the work shows Bauer turning from the fairy-tale imagery for which he is best known toward a more monumental and explicitly mythological mode. Using his wife, Esther Ellqvist, as the model, he gives Freyja a vivid human presence while preserving her aura of distance and divinity. The result is an image that feels at once intimate and elevated, rooted in Nordic legend yet shaped by personal emotion and artistic ambition.

John Bauer and a Late Mythological Work

John Bauer is most widely celebrated for his illustrations for Among Gnomes and Trolls, but Freja belongs to a later and more ambitious phase of his career. Painted in 1917, the work was commissioned for the Karlskrona girls’ school and stands among the final major projects he completed before his death in 1918. By this point, Bauer had already established a distinctive visual language shaped by folklore, romantic nationalism, and his training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm. In Freja, however, he moved beyond the intimate scale of book illustration and into a more expansive treatment of Nordic mythology.

Esther Ellqvist as Freyja

The choice of Esther Ellqvist as the model gives the painting a personal and emotional dimension. Esther, an artist in her own right, appears in Bauer’s work with some frequency, and here her features lend Freyja both immediacy and warmth. At the same time, Bauer preserves the goddess’s grandeur, presenting her not simply as a portrait in costume but as a figure suspended between the human and the divine. This blending of private reference and mythological subject matter is part of what gives the painting its particular intensity.

A Work of Boldness and Presence

A well-known anecdote surrounding the painting tells that Bauer’s friends jokingly referred to it as “Mrs. Bauer’s breast portrait,” a teasing response to its unusually bold and sensual treatment of the goddess. The nickname points to how striking the image must have seemed at the time. Rather than presenting Freyja as distant or purely idealized, Bauer emphasized her physical presence and vitality. This boldness reflects his willingness in his later years to test new artistic directions and to approach mythological subjects with greater scale, freedom, and emotional directness.

Freyja and Nordic Mythology

The painting holds strong cultural resonance because Freyja is one of the most complex and important figures in Norse mythology. She is associated with love, beauty, fertility, war, and magic, and Bauer’s image appears to embrace that duality. Freyja is not merely gentle or decorative here; she also carries a sense of authority and inner force. In myth, she is a goddess of desire and abundance, but also of battle and death, receiving half of the fallen warriors in her hall, Fólkvangr. Bauer’s interpretation seems to respond to this layered identity, presenting a figure who is both alluring and formidable.

Romantic Nationalism and Educational Setting

The work also belongs to the broader context of early twentieth-century romantic nationalism in Sweden, when artists and writers frequently turned to Nordic history and mythology in search of cultural depth and identity. In this sense, Freja was well suited to its original placement in a school auditorium. It functioned not only as decoration, but also as an image of cultural inheritance, bringing a figure from Norse tradition into an educational environment. Bauer’s treatment gives the subject dignity and emotional richness, making the painting feel both instructive and imaginative.

Technique and Scale

Freja is an oil painting on canvas measuring 80 × 155 cm (31.4 × 61 in.). The use of oil allows Bauer to work with richer colour, softer transitions, and a fuller sense of texture than in many of his illustrations. The horizontal format gives the figure breadth and presence, and the larger scale lends the work a commanding visual impact. Bauer’s style here still retains the lyrical atmosphere associated with his earlier art, but it is translated into a more substantial and painterly form, shaped by romantic and Art Nouveau influences.

Location and Later History

The painting was created specifically for the aula of the Karlskrona girls’ school in 1917. Its exact present location is not confirmed here, though it has been associated with a later auction in 2007 and may now be in a private collection. Whatever its current setting, Freja remains an important example of Bauer’s late work and of his effort to expand his art beyond fairy-tale illustration into a more monumental engagement with Nordic myth.