A ghost, in most stories, shows itself to one person only, and everyone else in the room sees nothing. That is a strange thing to ask of a painting, which shows the same image to whoever stands in front of it. The twelve pictures here, from Norway to Japan to Tahiti, each found a different way out.
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How These Were Chosen
A ghost painting shows a dead person, or a spirit of the dead, made visible to the living. The subject asks for a figure who is there and not there at once, and painters answer with what paint can do: a body thin enough to see through, reduced to bones, or lit unlike anyone else.
The harder choice has nothing to do with technique. The painter must decide where to put the viewer: beside the one who sees, or among the people who see nothing and watch someone react to an empty chair.
Every picture here was chosen for the way it settles that question. The stories come from the Bible, epic poetry, the stage, folk belief and one painter's own visions, and two woodblock prints and a watercolor sit beside the oils.
12. Peter Nicolai Arbo, The Wild Hunt of Odin (1872)
Among the riders crossing the long canvas, one swings a hammer over his head. He is Thor, calling to Tanngnjost and Tanngrisne, the goats that pull his chariot. Around him a whole troop rides through a moonlit landscape, seen from the side as it passes, with Odin's ravens close behind, the troll Gyro Rysserova at the rear and a fiery light breaking out behind them all.
The troop is made of the dead. Peter Nicolai Arbo, a Norwegian trained at the academies of Copenhagen and Düsseldorf, painted The Wild Hunt of Odin in Paris in 1872. He built it out of Norse mythology, archaeological finds and Asgaardsreien, a poem by Johan Sebastian Welhaven, and his riders are the ghosts and souls of the dead who find no rest.
Behind the myths and the poem lay an older Norwegian folk belief, the åsgårdsrei or oskoreia, a noisy troop of the dead or of supernatural beings. Those who rode in it had earned neither heaven nor hell, and so they were condemned to ride without end.
The belief also told the living what to do. Anyone who met the troop outdoors was supposed to throw himself to the ground and lie in the shape of a cross.
Arbo had first imagined the scene another way. In a watercolor dated June 1870, his riders charge straight at the viewer. On the 1872 canvas he turned them sideways, and I prefer that angle, where the dead go by at a distance, as they would have looked to someone lying flat in a field.
At a Glance
Artist: Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831 to 1892)
Painted: 1872
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 166 × 240.5 cm (65.5 × 94.5 in)
Where to see it: Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
11. Frank Dicksee, A Reverie (1895)
A man in dark evening clothes has sunk into an armchair on the right of A Reverie, one hand pressed to his forehead. It is after dinner in a drawing room, and his wife, in a cream dress, plays the piano under a lamp with a yellow shade. At the far left stands a woman with long hair, hands raised on either side of her head, so faint that the wall shows through her. Nothing in the room says yet who she is, or which of the two can see her.