Kay Nielsen
Based on Wikipedia: Kay Nielsen
He died in poverty, forgotten by the art world that had once celebrated him as Scandinavia's most famous artist. His widow, sick with diabetes, gave away his remaining illustrations to a friend who tried desperately to donate them to museums. Every single one refused.
Today, Kay Nielsen's work sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, and the Disney company credits him as an inspiration for the visual development of Frozen. His illustrations hang in major museums around the world. But in 1957, when Kay Nielsen took his last breath under a mural he had painted for a church in Los Angeles, he was a relic from another age, a man whose ethereal visions no longer had a place in the commercial art world.
This is the story of an artist who helped define the golden age of illustration, fell into obscurity, and was rediscovered only after it was too late to matter to him.
Born Into the Theater
Kay Rasmus Nielsen came into the world on March 12, 1886, in Copenhagen, Denmark, already surrounded by performance and artistry. His father, Martinus Nielsen, directed the Dagmarteater, one of Copenhagen's prominent theaters. His mother, Oda Nielsen, was considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation, celebrated at both the Royal Danish Theater and her husband's Dagmarteater.
Imagine growing up backstage. The smell of greasepaint and sawdust. Watching your mother transform into queens and peasants, heroines and villains, night after night. Seeing how light and shadow could remake reality. This theatrical upbringing would shape everything Nielsen created—his illustrations would always carry a sense of drama, of staged tableaux frozen at their most magical moment.
Rather than follow his parents onto the stage, Nielsen chose to create worlds with paint and ink instead of voice and gesture. At eighteen, he left Copenhagen for Paris to study art.
Paris and the Making of a Style
From 1904 to 1911—seven formative years—Nielsen studied at two of the most prestigious art academies in Paris. The Académie Julian was known for preparing students for the official École des Beaux-Arts, while the Académie Colarossi had a more bohemian reputation and was one of the few schools that admitted women on equal terms with men.
Paris at the turn of the century was intoxicated with Japanese art. Woodblock prints by masters like Hokusai and Hiroshige had been flooding into Europe since Japan opened to Western trade in the 1850s, and artists were obsessed with their flat planes of color, their bold outlines, their willingness to leave empty space. This aesthetic, known as Japonisme, influenced everyone from the Impressionists to the Art Nouveau designers.
Nielsen absorbed it all. His mature style would blend the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau with the compositional elegance of Japanese prints, adding his own sense of Northern European folklore—cold forests, ancient magic, figures that seemed to emerge from mist and memory.
The Golden Age of Illustration
To understand Nielsen's career, you need to understand a specific technological moment. For most of human history, reproducing images in books was expensive and difficult. Woodcuts and engravings required skilled craftsmen to carve every line by hand. Photographs existed but couldn't easily be printed alongside text.
Then, in the late nineteenth century, printing technology reached a tipping point. Photomechanical processes allowed publishers to reproduce paintings and drawings with reasonable fidelity and affordable cost. Suddenly, lavishly illustrated books became commercially viable.
This was the Golden Age of Illustration, roughly spanning from the 1880s to the 1920s. Artists like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Kay Nielsen became celebrities. Publishers competed to produce ever more beautiful gift books, featuring fairy tales and legends adorned with full-color plates on special paper, tipped in by hand. These were luxury objects meant to be treasured.
Nielsen moved to England in 1911, positioning himself at the center of this lucrative market.
Fairy Tales in Powder and Moonlight
His big break came in 1913 when the publishing house Hodder and Stoughton commissioned him to illustrate a collection of fairy tales called In Powder and Crinoline. The title evokes the eighteenth century—powdered wigs and wide skirts supported by frames of whalebone—and the tales, retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, drew from that courtly era.
Nielsen created twenty-four color plates and more than fifteen black-and-white illustrations. They were unlike anything readers had seen before. Where Arthur Rackham's fairies were gnarled and earthy, Nielsen's figures were elongated and elegant, existing in spaces that seemed to defy gravity. His palette was unusual—cool silvers and icy blues rather than the warm tones typical of the era.
That same year, The Illustrated London News commissioned him to illustrate four tales by Charles Perrault for their Christmas edition: Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and Bluebeard. The exposure was enormous.
But his masterpiece was still to come.
East of the Sun and West of the Moon
In 1914, Hodder and Stoughton published Nielsen's illustrations for a collection of Norwegian folk tales called East of the Sun and West of the Moon. If you've ever seen a Nielsen illustration, it was probably from this book.
The collection featured twenty-five color plates and over twenty black-and-white images. The technical quality was remarkable—while most color illustrations of the era used a three-color printing process, Nielsen's work was reproduced using four colors, allowing for subtler gradations and more faithful reproduction of his originals.
The stories themselves were strange and haunting, as Scandinavian folk tales tend to be. A girl rides on the back of a great white bear to a castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon. Trolls burst when exposed to sunlight. Enchantments can only be broken through years of silent suffering.
Nielsen's illustrations captured this otherworldly atmosphere perfectly. His heroines were willowy figures in flowing gowns, dwarfed by vast landscapes or looming supernatural beings. His decorative borders drew from Nordic design traditions, incorporating intricate patterns that recalled Viking carvings and medieval manuscripts. The images felt both ancient and modern, rooted in tradition yet startlingly innovative.
At twenty-eight, Nielsen had established himself as one of the premier illustrators of his generation.
War and Disruption
Then the world fell apart. The First World War, which began the same year East of the Sun and West of the Moon was published, disrupted the luxury book market. Paper was rationed. Publishers focused on essentials rather than beautiful gift books. The golden age that had seemed so permanent revealed itself as fragile, dependent on peace and prosperity.
Nielsen produced a series of illustrations depicting Joan of Arc around this time—a perhaps inevitable subject for a wartime artist. But his career as a book illustrator was essentially on hold.
In 1917, he sailed to New York for an exhibition of his work, then returned to Denmark. He wasn't idle—he collaborated with Johannes Poulsen to paint stage scenery for the Royal Danish Theater, drawing on his childhood immersion in theatrical production. He also began an ambitious project: a complete suite of illustrations for a Danish translation of The Arabian Nights, working with the Arabic scholar Professor Arthur Christensen.
Nielsen envisioned parallel editions in Danish, English, and French. He poured years into the project. It never came to fruition. The illustrations remained unknown until after his death, a major work that the world never saw during his lifetime.
A Brief Return to Glory
The 1920s brought a partial revival. Nielsen returned to stage design in Copenhagen, creating sets and costumes for professional theater. At forty, he married Ulla Pless-Schmidt, a twenty-two-year-old daughter of a wealthy physician. By all accounts, they became a devoted couple, remaining together until his death more than three decades later.
He was, at this point, Scandinavia's most famous artist. The phrase sounds like hyperbole, but the illustrated book market had made visual artists into celebrities in a way we might find difficult to imagine today.
Nielsen also returned to book illustration. In 1924, Hodder and Stoughton published his illustrations for Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen—twelve color plates and more than forty black-and-white illustrations. The color images featured elaborate borders in a style called mille fleur, meaning "thousand flowers," a technique borrowed from medieval tapestries where the background is filled with countless small floral motifs.
A year later came Hansel and Gretel, and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm, with twelve color plates and over twenty detailed black-and-white illustrations. In 1930, Red Magic appeared with eight color plates and more than fifty black-and-white contributions.
Red Magic was his last major illustrated book. The market was changing. The Great Depression had begun. The golden age was definitively over.
Hollywood Dreams
In 1939, at fifty-three years old, Nielsen made a desperate gamble. He left for California.
Hollywood was hungry for artists. The film industry needed designers, concept artists, people who could visualize fantasy worlds. Nielsen had spent his entire career doing exactly that. Surely there was a place for him.
Through a personal recommendation from Joe Grant, a Disney story artist and character designer, Nielsen secured a position at the Walt Disney Company. It should have been the perfect fit. Disney was in the midst of his most ambitious period, pushing the boundaries of what animation could achieve.
Nielsen contributed to what would become one of the most celebrated sequences in animation history: Night on Bald Mountain, the climax of Fantasia. This sequence, set to Modest Mussorgsky's tone poem of the same name, depicts the demon Chernabog summoning spirits and ghosts on Walpurgis Night. It then transitions, without a break, into Ave Maria, as the demonic revelry gives way to a procession of lights moving through a forest toward a cathedral.
The imagery is pure Nielsen—the elongated demonic figure, the ethereal spirits, the contrast between darkness and transcendent light. He created concept paintings and story sketches that shaped the final animation.
He also developed concept art for a proposed adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Disney planned a package film—a feature composed of several shorter segments—based on Andersen's fairy tales. Nielsen seemed uniquely qualified to visualize these stories from his own Scandinavian tradition.
The Little Mermaid was shelved. It would finally reach screens in 1989, more than fifty years later—and more than thirty years after Nielsen's death.
After four years at Disney, from 1937 to 1941, Nielsen was let go. The official reason: his work was "too dark." This was not merely an aesthetic judgment. Disney was pivoting toward brighter, more commercially appealing styles. Nielsen's shadowy, elongated figures, perfect for Fantasia's demonic climax, didn't fit the studio's direction.
The Long Decline
He briefly returned to Denmark, hoping to find that his reputation still meant something there. It didn't. The art world had moved on. His style, which had seemed so innovative in 1914, now looked old-fashioned. Abstract expressionism was emerging. Illustration itself was being devalued as fine artists increasingly dismissed commercial work.
Nielsen returned to California. His final years were spent in poverty.
He took whatever work he could find. He painted murals for local schools and churches. One of his last works was for the Wong Chapel at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, illustrating the Twenty-Third Psalm—"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." There's something almost unbearably poignant about this: an artist who had once visualized enchanted castles and fairy princesses, now painting biblical scenes for a church that would pay him.
His very last work was a mural at Central Junior High School in Los Angeles, entitled "The First Spring." In notes about the work, Nielsen expressed gratitude to the nation that had given him "a welcome and freedom to paint in the tragic final years of his life." Even at the end, he was grateful. Even in poverty and obscurity, he found meaning in the act of creation.
Nielsen was a heavy smoker. He developed a chronic cough that plagued him for years. On June 21, 1957, at seventy-one years old, he died.
His funeral service was held beneath his own mural in the Wong Chapel. Ulla, his devoted wife of more than three decades, died the following year.
Resurrection
Before her death, Ulla gave Nielsen's remaining illustrations to Frederick Monhoff, a fellow artist and architect. Monhoff tried to donate them to museums. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston said no. Danish museums said no. Nobody wanted them.
Monhoff kept them anyway. And slowly, inexorably, the art world's assessment began to shift.
The 1970s brought a resurgence of interest in Art Nouveau and the golden age of illustration. Fantasy art was becoming respectable again, driven partly by the success of authors like Tolkien and the emerging fantasy genre in publishing. Artists began citing Nielsen as an influence. Collectors started seeking out his work.
Auction prices climbed. Original Nielsen illustrations that might have sold for a few hundred dollars in the 1960s began fetching tens of thousands. Then hundreds of thousands. In recent years, major Nielsen works have sold for over half a million dollars at auction.
Disney, too, has acknowledged its debt. When developing Frozen in the 2010s, the visual development team explicitly drew on Nielsen's aesthetic—his elongated figures, his icy Scandinavian palette, his sense of folkloric wonder. The film that became one of the highest-grossing animated features in history carries his DNA in every frame.
Museums now eagerly accept Nielsen works. The illustrations that Frederick Monhoff couldn't give away are now prized possessions. In 2021, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston—the same institution that had once refused Monhoff's donation—published a major exhibition catalog: Kay Nielsen: An Enchanted Vision.
What We See When We Look at Nielsen
Why does Nielsen's work still captivate us, more than a century after it was created?
Part of the answer is technical mastery. Nielsen was an extraordinary draftsman with an unerring sense of composition. His images are balanced yet dynamic, filled with intricate detail yet never cluttered. The influence of Japanese prints gives them a flatness that feels modern, while his Art Nouveau curves and Nordic motifs root them in tradition.
But technique alone doesn't explain his enduring appeal. There's something in Nielsen's work that speaks to a deep human longing for enchantment. His illustrations don't merely depict fairy tales—they seem to emerge from the same dreamspace where fairy tales originate. They feel true in a way that has nothing to do with realism.
His figures are not idealized humans but something slightly other: more elongated, more ethereal, existing in a world where physics and probability work differently. His landscapes are not places you could visit but places you might reach in dreams—forests that go on forever, castles that exist east of the sun and west of the moon, in the direction that has no direction.
Nielsen understood that fairy tales are not primarily entertainment. They are maps of the psyche, guides to transformation, stories about how children become adults and how the powerless find their power. His illustrations honor that depth. They don't condescend to the material.
The Tragedy and the Triumph
Kay Nielsen's life follows a pattern we've seen before in art history: early success, changing tastes, decline, posthumous rediscovery. It happened to Vermeer. It happened to El Greco. It happened to countless artists whose work fell out of fashion only to be reclaimed by later generations.
What makes Nielsen's story particularly poignant is how close he came to a different ending. He worked for Disney at the height of the studio's creative ambition. He contributed to Fantasia, a film that has never gone out of print, that has introduced millions of viewers to the marriage of animation and classical music. His concept art for The Little Mermaid was sitting in Disney's archives when a new generation of artists finally brought that story to the screen.
If he had been born a decade later—or if the golden age of illustration had lasted a bit longer—or if Disney had found more projects suited to his vision—things might have been different. He might have died recognized rather than forgotten, comfortable rather than impoverished.
But perhaps there's another way to see it. Nielsen spent his final years creating murals for schools and churches, bringing beauty to ordinary spaces where ordinary people would encounter it. He painted the Twenty-Third Psalm for a chapel where funerals and weddings would be held, where people in moments of profound emotion would look up and see his vision. He expressed gratitude for the freedom to paint.
And now, decades after his death, his work is more celebrated than ever. The museums that once refused his illustrations now build exhibitions around them. The company that let him go now credits him as an inspiration for billion-dollar films. Children who have never heard his name grow up seeing his influence in the animated features they love.
East of the sun and west of the moon—that's where the enchanted castle lies in the old Norwegian tale. It's a place that seems impossible to reach, existing in a direction that doesn't exist. Yet somehow, improbably, against all odds, the heroine in the story gets there.
Kay Nielsen spent his life trying to show us what that impossible place looks like. He succeeded. And now, finally, the world has found its way there too.