“And then she lay on a little green patch in the midst of the gloomy thick wood”
Oftentimes, when writing these posts, I come across amazingly talented artists whose work fell out of favor in their lifetime and they died poor. Of course, today their work sells for thousands, if not millions. It’s heartbreaking. Kay Nielsen is one of those artists.
This wonderful piece is by the Danish illustrator, Kay Nielsen, from 1914 and is titled “And then she lay on a little green patch in the midst of the gloomy thick wood”. This is a lithograph, but the original was watercolor and ink on paper.
This is one of many gorgeous pieces Nielsen created for the publication of East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North, a collection of Scandinavian Folk Tales. Published in 1914 when Nielsen was just 28 years old, this book contained 15 fairy tales collected from folklorists across Scandinavia.
This piece was illustrated for the story “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” for which Nielsen created five drawings. “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” is a Norwegian folktale loosely related to “Beauty and the Beast” and “Cupid and Psyche”.
In this story, a young peasant girl is sold to a rich human in bear form by her father. The girl lives in a castle in the deep woods with the bear. Every night, the bear visits the girl’s bed, with the one rule that she cannot light any candles to see him.
After allowed a visit to her parents, the girl’s mother persuades her daughter to light a candle to look at the figure who comes to her bed, fearing it to be a troll. When the daughter does, she finds the sleeping bear to be the most handsome man she has ever seen.
A drop of the candle wax falls on the sleeping man who wakes up. He tells her that he is a prince who was cursed by his mother to take up the form of a bear during the day. If she had waited a year before seeing him, the prince would have been free. Now that she has seen him, he has to go to a castle east of the sun and west of the moon to marry a troll princess.
When the girl wakes the next morning, the castle and the bear are gone, and she is all alone in the deep dark woods. She searches for the castle, asking people for directions and help along the way. No one knows where the castle is, but they offer her valuable items to aid her on her journey.
The North Wind finally helps the girl to reach the castle. Each night, the girl trades one of the valuable items she was given to the troll princess to be allowed to spend the night with the prince. However, each night the prince is drugged by the troll princess and does not wake up at all during the entire night.
The townspeople hear the sad cry of the girl during the day and tell the prince. The next night, he refuses his sleeping draught and wakes up when the girl comes. The prince tells the girl how she can outwit the trolls, which she does. And the prince and the peasant girl live happily ever after.
The original drawing of “And then she lay on a little green patch in the midst of the gloomy thick wood” is in a private collection, but thankfully we can enjoy his work through one of the many reproductions of the original 1914 publication.
For more on Kay Nielsen, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
