Swedish literature has a long pedigree compared to Swedish art, which is hardly more than two centuries old. All the more remarkable, then, is its rapid growth and high degree of excellence. The first school of Swedish painters was founded by the German Ehrenstrahl, giving to Swedish art the cosmopolitan character it has preserved to this day, influenced by continental but chiefly French art. Swedish painters early attracted attention abroad. Gustavus Lundberg, with a picture of Boucher and his wife, won the greatest success of the Salon of Paris, in 1743. Peter Adolphus Hall, “painter to the king and the children of France,” has been called the Van Dyck of the miniature painters. He resided in Paris up to the time of the revolution and took part in the storming of the Bastile. Alexander Roslin was, from the year 1760, installed in the Louvre as painter to the king and councillor of the French Academy. In 1771 he carried home a prize which the immortal Greuze could not capture, much to the dismay of Diderot, and died as the most famous and wealthy artist of the period. In a later period, Italy attracted many Swedish artists, and later still, in the sixties of the present century, the influence of Germany, especially of the Dusseldorf school, was strongly felt. John Frederic Hœckert won the first prize of the Paris Exposition of 1855 with his large picture “Divine Service in the Lapmark.” When the glories of Hœckert were almost forgotten at home, Edward Wahlberg, in the seventies, was ushered into celebrity as one of the greatest landscape painters of modern times, equally appreciated in Germany, as later in France, and new French laurels were won by Hugo Salmson, William von Gegerfelt and August Hagborg. Since then French influences have become solidly established, with a few important artists of the Munich school, like C. G. Hellquist and Julius Kronberg. The climax of artistic honors was reached by Nils Forsberg, whose picture, “The Death of a Hero,” carried home the first prize of the French Salon in 1888 (not an exposition medal), a distinction which no Swede and exceedingly few non-French artists ever won. The repeated successes which Swedish painters have won at expositions of Europe were more than duplicated by the enthusiastic approval granted it at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. The truth is that Sweden possesses a number of eminent painters in every branch of painting, except the marine, which has been but sparingly represented since the days of Marcus Larsson. The most famous among them are, besides those already mentioned, Richard Bergh, Oscar Biorck, Eva Bonnier, Gustavus Cederstrœm, Prince Eugene, Eugene Jansson, Ernst Josephson, Nils Kreuger, Carl Larsson, Bruno Liljefors, Charles Nordstrœm, Allan Œsterlind, Georg and Hanna Pauli, George von Rosen, Robert Thegerstrom, and A. L. Zorn. It has been said of the Swedish painters, by way of complaint, that they are not, as their