The Einar Jónsson Museum

This guide to the Einar Jonsson Museum in Reykjavik follows the sculptor's audacious 1909 offer to Iceland's parliament: he would give the nation every work he ever made, if it built him a home to hold them. It traces how he chose Skolavorduholt, then a desolate hill on the edge of the city, and shaped the whole building himself in clay before an architect built it exactly as he had molded it, opening in 1923 as the country's first art museum. Einar and his wife Anna lived on the top floor among his plaster trolls, gods, and grieving mothers, a household folded in among the sculptures he could not stop making.