Historical Miniatures

Some two dozen scenes from history, each a few pages: the Egyptian bondage, Alcibiades, Socrates, Julian the Apostate, Attila, Peter the Hermit, the Great Czar — Strindberg walking into a room at the moment a life turns, and walking out again. He was a librarian, a telegraph clerk and a journalist before The Red Room made him famous, and painted seascapes when he could not write. These late miniatures are his argument that history is made by people who do not know what they are doing. Fifty-nine plates of portraiture and sea pieces, from David's revolutionary faces to storm scenes by Bonavia and Schaap, run alongside Strindberg's turning points in history.