Solveig`s Song

Solveig's Song, painted in 1912 in tempera and now in the Tretyakov Gallery, illustrates Roerich's engagement with the Norse mythology and Scandinavian literature that had been a significant strand of European cultural romanticism since the mid-nineteenth century. Solveig is the faithful heroine of Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (1867), set to music by Edvard Grieg in his celebrated incidental score. She waits through the decades for the return of her wandering lover Peer Gynt, sustained by her own integrity and love. The subject connected Roerich's interest in northern medieval culture to a contemporary artistic tradition — the plays of Ibsen, the music of Grieg, the paintings of the Scandinavian national romantics — that was important to Russian artistic thought in the early twentieth century, particularly within the Symbolist circle in which Roerich moved.

Tempera on an unspecified support, a medium that Roerich used extensively for its capacity to produce matte, fresco-like surfaces that he associated with medieval icon painting and ancient wall decoration. The flat, luminous color planes of tempera suited his decorative compositional approach better than oil's capacity for atmospheric depth.