The Swedish turn-of-the-century painter Ivar Arosenis had a great liking for depicting his own features. He was also an inveterate storyteller, and he constantly recurs, more or less disguised, in the series of fairytales and separate pictorial narratives which constitute the greater part of his artistic output.
Gravely and intensly he eyes us in this painting from 1906. The melancholy character of the portrait echoes against the background landscape of the Nordic summer night and the almost deathly pallor of the face contrasts with the bright, blue-eyed gaze and the unpretentious Midsummer flower of the floral garland.
Arosenius was the centre of the mythical pictorial world with which he surrounded himself, portraying himself as the perpetual bohemian, true to the ideals of the turn of the century, and at the same time as a potential victim of his ever-imminent haemophilia. The wreath in the painting, formely kept as a token in the family, is now also in Nationalmuseum.