Art by John Bauer (1882-1918)

Bauer is the reason so many people picture Scandinavian trolls the way they do: hulking, stone-grey, tender and menacing at once, half-buried in mossy pine forest. He made his name illustrating Bland tomtar och troll ("Among Gnomes and Trolls"), a Swedish annual anthology of folk tales he contributed to nearly every year starting in 1907, and it's those images, more than his oil paintings, that made him a household name in Sweden.

He trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, but the real influence came from a trip to Swedish Lapland as a young man, which gave him a lasting fascination with the far north's dense forests and long shadows, recurring in nearly every troll illustration he made afterward. He often placed a small human figure, frequently a princess, next to his trolls purely for scale, which is part of what makes the creatures feel so enormous and the humans so fragile in comparison.

He never got the chance to build much further on it. In November 1918, at 36, Bauer drowned in Lake Vättern along with his wife Esther and their infant son Bengt when the steamer they were travelling on, the Per Brahe, sank in a storm en route to an exhibition of his work in Stockholm. He'd spent his whole career, short as it turned out to be, drawing a world just past the edge of the firelight.