Valkyries in winged helmets gallop through a storm on wild-eyed horses, one rider raising a spear, as shafts of lightning cut across billowing clouds. A bare tree bends in the wind at lower left, and the artist's signature and the date 1910 are at lower right. Arthur Rackham painted it for The Rhinegold & the Valkyrie, the first volume of Wagner's The Ring of the Niblung in Margaret Armour's translation, published by William Heinemann in London in 1910. It is plate 31 of the book's 34 and faces the end of Act III, scene 2 of The Valkyrie.

After Wotan's sentence on Brünnhilde, a flash of lightning shows her sisters packed closely together, riding wildly away with loose bridles. This is not, then, the famous ride that opens the act, but the sisters' flight. The V&A counts Rackham among the foremost illustrators of his day and notes that new three- and four-color halftone printing reproduced his watercolors in soft tones close to the originals. Our copy, a later impression of the book, comes from a collection of golden-age illustrated books.

It is in the Maastricht University Library in Maastricht.