The Mountain Gate (1918 CE)

A troll peers out from behind a towering mountain gate, half concealed by shadow and stone, as though the forest itself were holding its breath. In Bergaporten, John Bauer creates one of those charged threshold-moments for which his art is so memorable: nothing has fully happened yet, and yet everything feels on the verge of beginning. The red gate, the copper fittings, the moss, the trunks rising around it, and the strange figure behind the barrier all work together to create an image of suspense, secrecy, and enchantment. Small in scale but immense in atmosphere, the work opens onto that hidden realm where Bauer’s forests become myth.

A late work and an unfinished vision

Bergaporten was created in 1918, the last year of John Bauer’s life. By then he was already one of Sweden’s most beloved artists, above all through his illustrations for Bland Tomtar och troll, where he had given enduring visual form to the country’s fairy tales and forest beings. His art was shaped not only by folklore, but by academic training in Stockholm and by travels to Lapland, Germany, and Italy, all of which deepened his sense of landscape, stylization, and mythic atmosphere.

This watercolor belongs to the unrealized world of Bergakungen, a ballet project that Bauer became deeply involved in after the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine proposed a collaboration during his visit to Stockholm in 1913–1914. Fokine imagined a ballet growing out of Bauer’s fairy-tale imagery, and Bauer was to contribute both libretto and designs. That ambition matters here. Bergaporten is not simply an isolated fantasy image; it belongs to a larger theatrical vision in which Bauer sought to let his enchanted world step out of the book and onto the stage.

Gate, forest, and the border between worlds

The motif itself is deeply characteristic of Bauer. The gate is not merely a decorative structure placed in a woodland scene. It acts as a boundary, a point of passage between the human world and the unknown beyond. In Nordic folklore, such thresholds recur again and again: mountain doors, hidden halls, forest openings, and other places where ordinary space gives way to something older and more dangerous. Here, the troll’s partial concealment makes that boundary even more potent. It is present, visible, and yet not fully revealed.

Bauer was especially gifted at making his trolls feel inseparable from the landscape. They are not intruders in nature, but beings who belong to it completely. In Bergaporten, the troll seems almost to emerge from the rock and moss beside the gate, as if the forest had produced it. That closeness between creature and environment is part of what gives Bauer’s work its peculiar conviction: his fairy-tale world feels invented, but never arbitrary.

The red gate intensifies this effect. It is the painting’s strongest visual accent, but it is also its symbolic center. It suggests prohibition, secrecy, and the possibility of entry, while the copper fittings give it an ancient, almost ceremonial gravity. The entire image rests on that tension between concealment and invitation.

The ballet and its afterlife

The later history of the Bergakungen project gives the work an added poignancy. Bauer died in November 1918 in the Per Brahe disaster on Lake Vättern, together with his wife Ester and their son Bengt. After his death, the Royal Swedish Opera still went ahead with the ballet, which premiered in 1923 with music by Hugo Alfvén, but without Bauer’s own designs. Other artists were brought in, and his family later pursued a legal case over his rights in the project. They won recognition of his intellectual contribution.

That background gives Bergaporten a different emotional weight. It is not only a finished picture, but also a surviving fragment of something larger that Bauer never had the chance to complete. The painting therefore belongs both to his independent body of work and to a lost theatrical undertaking that remained suspended by tragedy.

Technique and atmosphere

Executed in watercolor with ink, gouache, and pencil on paper, the work measures 23.5 × 24.5 cm (9.25 × 9.65 inches). Its modest size makes the image’s monumentality all the more striking. Bauer uses a restrained palette of grey-red and bronze-green tones, allowing the gate and the filtered light to stand out without breaking the hush of the scene. The vertical pine trunks frame the composition and add a solemn architectural quality, while the moss-covered rock and shadowed forest floor keep the image rooted in tactile natural detail.

What is especially compelling is Bauer’s balance between realism and fantasy. The textures of bark, metal, and stone feel closely observed, yet the scene as a whole remains dreamlike. Light enters gently through the trees, touching the troll and the gate just enough to animate them without dispelling the mystery. That restraint is central to the painting’s power. Bauer shows little, but suggests much.

Legacy

After Bauer’s death, Bergaporten continued to be valued both as an artwork in its own right and as part of the story of Bergakungen. It was shown in the John Bauer memorial exhibition at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm in 1934, and later included in Trollbunden: John Bauer och den magiska naturen at Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde in 2020–2021. Its appearance at auction, where it sold for 350,000 SEK, confirms the lasting fascination exerted by Bauer’s late work.

Even without the completed ballet it once pointed toward, Bergaporten remains intensely complete as an image. It gathers many of Bauer’s deepest strengths into a single scene: the mystery of the forest, the nearness of the supernatural, and the feeling that behind the visible world another one is waiting.