The painting Vase with Flowers by the Dutch artist Jan van Huysum was in a private collection just outside Christiania (now Oslo) when the Norwegian firebrand and poet Henrik Wergeland saw it early in 1840. It inspired him to write his best-known work, an extraordinary tour-de-force of Nordic Romanticism. The poem adopts a free attitude towards historical events and people, refers to fictitious works of art by real painters, and zigzags between verse and prose in a glorious rejection of conventional literary form. It represents the triumph of Romanticism, its main theme the terrible price of beauty, the high existential cost of art. Translated by John Irons.