The Coronation of King Gustav III of Sweden. Uncompleted

The central figure in the painting is King Gustav III. He is wearing his white coronation costume that seems almost to radiate light. A crown is in the process of being placed on his head by the senior member of the State Council together with Archbishop Beronius. To the left are the nobility, above them the burghers, behind the throne are the priests and on the far right the farmers. The coronation scene is bathed in misty, blue-grey sunlight and the painting is dominated by tones of deep green and grey-brown.

The bottom right-hand corner of the painting is bare. The canvas is visible as are some boldly sketched lines. In places the paint seems bubbly and dried up into a leathery, grey-black layer.

In spite of this, many people consider the coronation picture to be one of the greatest masterpieces of Swedish art. It is the work of the then director of the Academy of Fine Arts, the court painter Carl-Gustav Pilo. He can be seen among the farmers on the right at the top of the painting. He is the rotund gentleman offering his friend and colleague Elias Martin a pinch of snuff. In the other hand he holds a silver cane.

Pilo grounded the canvas with a yellow-brown coating on which he sketched the figures and the various spaces. To give the parts in shadow a deeper tone he filled these in with a thin layer of asphalt. It is because of the asphalt that the painting today appears bubbly and viscous. The painting has been exposed to the sun or to another source of heat which has caused the asphalt to blister and the paint to move. At certain points the undercoating has forced its way up through the covering layers of paint. The face, for example, had been doubled.

When Pilo had been working on the painting for more than ten years, Gustav III was murdered at the opera and in the following years of 1793, Pilo himself died. The painting had not been completed. Generations of visitors have been fascinated by the coronation painting.