Just after Christmas, on 29 December, we will commemorate the centenary of the death of one of the most curious French painters of the time. Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) followed the academic tradition, became one of the Nabis, painted a series of disturbing domestic interiors, and some of the finest landscapes of the early twentieth century. This brief series scratches the surface of his eclectic art.

Félix Édouard Vallotton was born in Lausanne in Switzerland, and moved to Paris in 1882 to study under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Académie Julian. His early influences included the paintings of JAD Ingres, and he started painting portraits following the academic tradition.

Among those early works is this Self-portrait at 20 from 1885.

In the late 1880s he learned to make prints, apparently through his friendship with the Polish artist in his painting of Félix Jasinski in his Printmaking Studio from 1887. Although Jasinski was successful at the time, his work now seems to have been largely forgotten. Vallotton soon became fascinated by Japanese woodcuts, including ukiyo-e that had become so popular in the late nineteenth century. He collected them, and in 1891 started making his own woodcuts.

The year that he left the Académie Julian, he started painting his long series of domestic interiors that could be read as ‘problem pictures’ with open narrative. He began gently with The Visit or The Top Hat, Interior (1887), the year that he also exhibited his first two paintings (both portraits) at the Salon. A top hat and walking stick are parked on a chair just inside an apartment, whose door is partly open. Everything looks in order, except for the painting hanging on the wall at the right, which is at an odd angle.

The Sick Girl from 1892 uses a theme that was popular with Naturalist painters throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. His model was his muse and lover Hélène Chatenay, whom he had met in 1889. They remained a couple until the late 1890s, and in 1907 she was tragically killed by a car.

His detailed realism here extends to showpiece surface reflections from the glassware and polished wood, but he curiously obscures the face of the young woman in her sickbed by reversing the bed’s normal orientation. Many of his apparently humdrum interiors have unusual twists such as this, adding the strangeness later to be formally exploited in Surrealism. Another odd feature in this painting is that the maid who has just entered the room appears to be heading towards the viewer, and isn’t even looking towards her patient.

The Cook at the Stove, or simply The Cook, from 1892 is another domestic genre scene drawn from Naturalism, and features Hélène Chatenay again. She stands at the solid-top range in a kitchen strangely almost devoid of the one thing that kitchens are for: food. The only edible item visible is a bunch of onions suspended in mid-air. Everything – the chairs, pots and pans, and the range itself – is spotless as if they have never been used, and appear unnatural.

In 1892, Vallotton made lifelong friendships with key members of the Nabis, including Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard. Because of his Swiss origins, he was dubbed the Foreign Nabi.

His most overtly Nabi painting is Bathing on a Summer Evening from 1892-93. These flattened and stylised figures representing women of all ages have been applied like collage to a background reminiscent of some of Ferdinand Hodler’s alpine meadows.

In 1893, Vallotton painted his remarkable Waltz, on which he appears to have sprinkled thousands of multi-coloured dots to give its surface a fine sparkle. Couples sweep across an unseen dance floor, embraced in a lover’s waltz, with just one of their faces clearly visible.

Unlike Pierre Bonnard, Vallotton doesn’t appear to have painted many views of Paris, but this Street Scene in Paris from 1895 shows more Nabi style and some overlap with Bonnard’s contemporary motifs, even down to the dog wandering in the middle of the road.

Like the other Nabis, Vallotton became involved with the Natanson brothers, and their magazine Revue Blanche published a series of ten of his prints of interiors in 1898. He provides us with a glimpse into the private life of Misia Natanson, as she was at the time, in his Misia at Her Dressing Table (1898), again in Nabi style.

Vallotton remained under Nabi influence when he painted The Red Room in 1898 to the extent that he used distemper, a traditional medium the group had resurrected. A man and woman stand in a loose embrace in the doorway of a living room with brick red decor. Above the fireplace is what could be a mirror, or a painting, in which a person dressed in black is standing in the distance, apparently looking away from the couple.

A similar well-dressed couple embrace more closely in The Visit from 1899, also painted in distemper. Once again, Vallotton leaves the painting’s underlying narrative open.

As he moved on from his brief affair with the Nabis, and the group itself disintegrated, Vallotton experimented with unusual points of view, as in The Ball from 1899. A young girl is chasing her red ball, as two women talk in the distance. This is seen from mid-air above the girl, forming a simple but compelling motif with an air of mystery.

In the last year of the nineteenth century, he turned to painting landscapes on the north coast of France.

On Dieppe Beach from 1899 reduces this scene as only a printmaker could, to discrete forms filled with colour: the textured sand, sea, sky, and the simplified shapes of the three figures with a parasol.

He even painted one of the formative coastal landscapes of Impressionism, in his Seafront at Étretat (1899). Watching a gathering of fashionable ladies on the promenade is the cyclopean eye of the Manneporte.

In 1899, Vallotton married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a rich young widow who already had three children. The following year, he was granted French citizenship. In the early years of the new century, he was to concentrate on painting further strange motifs.

One of the small villages on the southern edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau grew into an artist’s colony in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Grez-sur-Loing is on the bend of the River Loing where it turns to the east to head for Moret-sur-Loing and empty into the River Seine at Saint-Mammès. The village lies between the road north from Nemours to Fontainebleau, and the river meandering in its floodplain.

Among those who painted there are John Singer Sargent, Carl Larsson who met his wife there, Bruno Liljefors the Swedish animal painter, PS Krøyer and other Nordic Impressionists of the Skagen group, Theodore Robinson and Willard Metcalf from the US, and the Glasgow Boys.

Like many others, the British artist Louis Welden Hawkins came to Grez from Paris, in his case by about 1880. He painted rural scenes in a style strongly reminiscent of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was only slightly older than Hawkins, and at the time making a great impression at the Salon. This is Hawkins’ Peasant Woman from about 1880.

Hawkins’ first success came with Orphans (1881), which shares Bastien-Lepage’s muted colours, attributed to the light supposedly peculiar to Grez. A young brother and sister are in a neglected graveyard, looking together at a pauper’s grave, apparently of one or both of their parents. This painting was awarded a third-class medal at the Salon that year, and marked the start of a run of his paintings exhibited at the following three Salons. It was purchased by the state in 1887 for 10,000 francs, and was also exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900.

Hawkins continued this style in The Last Step (c 1882), showing an elderly woman walking slowly with a stick in what may be the same graveyard. In the distance, a gravedigger is digging a new grave through the stony soil. The two engage in conversation, probably discussing where she will be buried in the not too distant future.

By 1882, the colony at Grez was becoming popular with Nordic painters who were developing their skills in France. Among them were the Swedish artists Carl Larsson and Karin Bergöö, who met there and later married.

Larsson’s paintings from Grez also appear to have been influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage. His watercolour of The Old Man and the Nursery Garden from 1883 shows similar muted colours, and common rural themes.

Larsson painted this touching portrait of The Bride at Grez the same year. It almost certainly shows his wife Karin, and was presumably intended as a wedding gift to her.

In the Country (1883) is typical of a number of views that Larsson painted of the rural poor in and around Grez, in the same realist style with soft colours. That year, he had his first painting accepted by the Paris Salon, and was getting valuable commissions for book illustrations.

The single figure in Larsson’s watercolour Autumn (1884) is dressed anachronistically in clothing from the previous century. This was most probably to please the Salon jury, as eighteenth century scenes were fashionable at the time. Its setting at Grez and his soft realism combine to make this one of his finest watercolours of this period.

Well before the Glasgow Boys came, John Lavery visited from Glasgow. Although he was born in Belfast, he moved to Glasgow when he was a child. After initially attending the Haldane Academy in Glasgow, he went to Paris in the early 1880s, where he was a student at the Académie Julian, where he was influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage and Millet, and painted at Grez-sur-Loing in 1884.

Lavery’s plein air oil sketch of The Principal Street at Grez from 1884 shows one of the many artists at work in the village, which had become popular internationally. Although following the course recommended for Naturalist painters, Lavery’s style is here thoroughly Impressionist.

At its height, Grez drew artists from all over the world, including some of the pioneers from Japan. In 1889 Asai Chū founded the first group of western-style (yōga) painters in Japan, and in 1898 was appointed professor of the forerunner of the Tokyo University of the Arts. In 1900 he moved to Paris for two years of study of Impressionism, and went to Grez to paint en plein air.

His Washing Place in Grez-sur-Loing shows small huts used by the village women to wash laundry in 1901.

The following year he painted this Bridge in Grez-sur-Loing before returning to Japan.

For much of that time, just over 12 km (7 miles) downstream, one of the great landscape artists of French Impressionism had been painting alone.

A century ago today, on 16 October 1925, the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg (1852–1925) died. Over the last month I’ve looked in detail at a selection of his paintings and given a brief account of his career and art. This concluding article is an overview to commemorate his death.

Like so many artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Krohg’s paintings were exhibited successfully at the time and were of substantial influence. But they were quickly discarded in the years after the First World War, as European art became overwhelmed by modernism and rejected much of the past. A century later we should now be able to form a better perspective.

As with most Norwegian painters of the day, Krohg trained mainly in Germany, in Karlsruhe and Berlin, ironically in part by the great Norwegian landscape artist Hans Gude. During that, Krohg must have become determined to help build and run a Norwegian state academy so the nation could train its own artists. He also developed an early concern over contemporary society in Norway, in inequality, poverty, the rise of prostitution, and Norway’s independence as a nation. As a writer and journalist, he not only tackled these in paint, but in his novel Albertine (1886) and numerous articles.

Early in his career he travelled to the developing artist’s colony at the northern tip of Jutland in Denmark, in the isolated fishing village of Skagen, the hotbed of Nordic Impressionism. He there started a ten-year project to document the life of one family, the Gaihedes.

Over successive summers, Krohg built a documentary account of their lives in clinical portraits and insights into their everyday routines. In Niels Gaihede Netting (c 1880) he shows them together, with Niels at work on his fishing net, and Ane in the background, staring sternly.

Krohg soon started to teach young artists, first at an art school for women, who were still fighting conservative attitudes persisting in the major academies at the time.

In 1881, with his painting of Sick Girl, he opened a new theme of illness in the family, here a girl who was dying of tuberculosis, then prevalent throughout Norway and much of the rest of Europe. This proved a direct inspiration for a motif taken up early in the paintings of Edvard Munch, who eventually made around twenty variants of the same theme.

At the time, prostitution was illegal in Norway, except in its capital where it was regulated by the police. Krohg was one of many who became concerned at the number of young women who were believed to move from country districts to work as seamstresses in the city, only to find that work too demanding and their income too low, so turned to prostitution.

Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published in 1886 and immediately banned by the police on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. This tells the story of a young seamstress who ends up a prostitute, an account Krohg turned into several paintings including Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87). His heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a motley line of women in various stages of decline.

A couple of years later, in his Struggle for Existence (1889) he painted a crowd of poor women and children queueing on Karl Johans Gate, Oslo’s central street, to be handed stale bread to ease their hunger. Three years later this was to be the setting for Edvard Munch’s famous painting of Evening on Karl Johan Street.

He declared his support for Norway’s independence in 17th of May 1893, marking what had been increasingly celebrated as Constitution Day since the signing of the national constitution in 1814. The Norwegian flag shown lacks the ‘herring salad’ badge, so indicating its freedom from union with Sweden, eventually achieved on 7 June 1905.

Throughout his paintings Krohg uses modern close-cropped compositions that may well have been influenced by photography. This is shown well in Reefing the Sails (1900), where two crew are working at a height on a square-rigged sailing ship.

In 1909 he was appointed the first professor and director of the State Academy of Art (Statens kunstakademi), and held the latter post until the year of his death.

Although he explored other themes in his later years, he still returned to the plight of young women toiling long hours at their sewing machines in the garrets of the city. His Seamstress’s Christmas Eve from 1921 offers more optimism that some could be rescued by charity.

Unusually, Krohg even left his own painted obituary in Five to Twelve, one of his last paintings, where he is asleep in a chair underneath a pendulum clock. The face of the clock is completely blank, but the title tells us the time: it is five minutes to midnight.

Krohg retired as the director of the State Academy of Art in 1925, and died in Oslo a few months later, on 16 October.

References

This blog:
Christian Krohg painting social reality 1: to 1883
Christian Krohg painting social reality 2: 1883-88
Christian Krohg painting social reality 3: 1888-95
Christian Krohg painting social reality 4: 1898-1924

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.

During the 1890s Christian Krohg was kept busy as a journalist. He visited the Lofoten Islands in the far north of Norway in the summer of 1896, and the following year visited the Netherlands and France. The year after, 1898, saw more travel, this time to Spain and France. He returned to Oslo in the late summer, where he remained until 1901.

In the late 1890s, Krohg returned to painting maritime motifs. These included yachting, as in The Shoal of 1898, showing a small wood-hulled cruising yacht sailing past a post mounted on a submerged pinnacle. In the depths below the post there are vague forms suggesting the hidden shoal. Unusually for Krohg, there isn’t a single figure to be seen, just the marker, the boat, and a choppy sea.

Judging by the number of Krohg’s paintings featuring small yachts, he appears to have been an enthusiastic sailor, although I haven’t seen any mention of that.

In his Setting Sail (c 1900), Krohg has switched to a clinker-built fishing boat, as two of its crew haul on a line to raise one of its sails. His figures are rougher and more sketchy here, but are clearly the same weather-beaten working men that he had painted previously. His composition crops the boat, figures, and mast closely, possibly influenced by photography; he’s believed to have become an enthusiastic photographer by the end of the nineteenth century.

Reefing the Sails (1900) is a more finished work, probably painted entirely in the studio, of two crew working at a height on a square-rigged sailing ship, another step up in scale. As they balance precariously to secure the sail to the spar, the sea far below them is white with breaking waves. Once again Krohg uses a close-cropped composition that may well have been based on a photograph.

Evening Breeze (c 1900) continues his maritime theme, but seems an odd, one-off painting. A nude woman stands in front of the setting (or rising) sun, holding her long blonde tresses out at arm’s length. She appears unreal: pale, almost a vision rather than solid and substantial form. I wonder if this was Krohg’s articulation of a new artistic vision.

In 1901, Krohg and his family moved to Paris. Although this was ostensibly to continue with his writing, he was soon taking on private pupils in art, and the following year returned to more serious painting when he started teaching at the Académie Colarossi in the city.

The only painting of Krohg’s I have been able to find from this period is another unusual one-off: The Umbrella (1902), which looks from its white picket fences as if it may have been painted in Norway. It’s a view looking down, presumably from the window of a building, on a lone woman. She is walking up a rough earth track, strewn with rocks, in windy weather. The umbrella of the title has been blown out by the wind. This reminds me of some of the optical explorations in Caillebotte’s earlier paintings.

Christian’s wife Oda painted this wonderful Portrait of Christian Krohg in about 1903. Although made during their years in Paris, it shows the artist by the Grand Café on Karl Johans Gate in the centre of Oslo, as a military band marches along the tramlines.

It wasn’t until 1909 that the Krohgs moved back to Norway, where Christian was appointed the first professor and director of the State Academy of Art (Statens kunstakademi), the latter post being held until the year of his death. The following year he finally ceased work as a journalist.

Krohg then tackled a new theme over a series of paintings. The first may be this Toilet (1912), in which a woman is seen in front of a full-length mirror. Although her clothing appears light and flimsy, as if underwear, she looks to be wearing a hat, at least in her reflection, where its brim stands proud of her head. Krohg’s facture is rough, and the woman’s features are partially obscured in his marks.

The Model (c 1913) is a sketchy portrait of a nude woman, who is just turning the knob of a door to open it, perhaps at the end of a modelling session. Krohg painted others in this series.

Girl Tying her Garter (1914) might bring the series to a logical and temporal conclusion, as a model completes dressing, ready to walk out of the studio. The strange object hanging at the top left appears to be an artist’s palette, or a hat.

In his latter years, Krohg returned to his major theme of the fallen woman and prostitution. In 1917, he produced a new compositional sketch for his famous Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room that he felt addressed his earlier painting’s theatricality.

He also painted an almost Dickensian narrative in his Seamstress’s Christmas Eve (1921). A young woman is in her garret bed-sit, where she has been toiling long hours at her sewing machine. An affluent couple, relatives or employers perhaps, have just arrived to give the young woman a Christmas tree, a large wicker basket of presents, and more. The oil lamp on the sewing table casts only a weak light, making the scene appear almost monochrome, in keeping with the young woman toiling in poverty and squalor.

Five to Twelve (c 1924) was one of Krohg’s last paintings, and appears to be a self-portrait. He’s shown with a long white beard, and almost bald, asleep in a chair underneath a pendulum clock. The face of the clock is completely blank, but the title tells us the time: it is five minutes to midnight, very late in his life.

In 1925, Krohg retired as the director of the State Academy of Art, and he died in Oslo a few months later, on 16 October. Although his paintings have been exhibited at many solo events in the Nordic countries, and alongside the works of others in many overseas exhibitions, he has still not had a one-man show outside Scandinavia, as far as I am aware.

References

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.

In the autumn of 1888, Christian Krohg married Oda Engelhardt, his former pupil, in Oslo. Although their relationship appears to have been open and stormy at times, Krohg now had a partner and a family to paint.

In the summer of 1888, the Krohgs returned to Skagen in Denmark where he painted Oda Krohg (1888). Although not as clinical as his series of portraits of the Gaihede family there, he uses the same profile pose, with his subject looking straight ahead as if in an identity photograph. That contrasts with his informal and sketchy facture.

Krohg’s three-quarter length Portrait of the Painter Oda Krohg, née Lasson (1888) is a marked contrast. Although still quite formal in its composition, Oda is here shown in her role as a ‘princess of the Bohemians’ that sadly overshadowed her own art.

Over this period Krohg had been working on his next major painting, The Struggle for Existence, also translated as The Struggle for Survival (1889). It shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. This is the central street in the capital city, and three years later was to be the setting for Edvard Munch’s famous painting of Evening on Karl Johan Street.

These people are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers in which to put the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

On this pessimistic note, Krohg’s ‘naturalism’ or social realism came to an end.

The Krohgs spent the summer of 1889 not at Skagen, but in the coastal resort of Åsgårdstrand, about sixty miles (100 km) south of Oslo. Nearly ten years later, Edvard Munch was to buy a summer house here. The Krohgs’ son Per, their second child, was born there that summer, and was almost certainly the model for In the Bathtub (1889). This shows the ceremonial surrounding the bathing of a newborn baby, with the mother and women relatives providing endless advice and taking charge of the event.

In the autumn, the family travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark, where they lived until early summer of 1890. They made a short visit to France, where Krohg was awarded a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. At this time, he had been working as a journalist and teaching, particularly at the painting school run by Harriet Backer.

When he was living in Copenhagen, Krohg painted one of his few works in Impressionist style, View over Frederiksberg, Copenhagen (1890), but decided not to further pursue landscape painting.

Instead, Krohg painted some history of contemporary relevance. Returning to his seafaring theme, his next successful work was a period drama dear to the Nordic heart: Leiv Eirikson Discovering America (1893). Leif Erikson was Nordic and had probably been one of the Norse inhabitants of Iceland between about 970-1020. The son of Erik the Red, who colonised Greenland, Leif visited Norway in about 999, and according to the Icelandic Sagas went on later to discover Newfoundland in Canada. When Krohg painted this, no archaeological evidence had been discovered to support the sagas, and that didn’t follow until 1960.

Krohg’s choice of motif drew on growing contemporary desire for complete independence of Norway from Sweden, and referred to the many Norwegians who had migrated to a better life in the US.

Probably painted in the same year, Krohg’s 17th of May 1893 was an even bolder statement about Norway’s nationhood. The seventeenth of May had been increasingly celebrated as Constitution Day since the signing of the national constitution in 1814. Not only is this painting full of Norwegian people, but the Norwegian flag shown lacks the ‘herring salad’ badge marking the union of Norway with Sweden, a clear indication of his feelings about independence.

From the autumn of 1893, Krohg was away from home almost constantly. He first went to Copenhagen, then on to Berlin and Paris. He stayed in Skagen for his last summer there in 1894 before returning to Oslo.

In 1895, he painted one of his more enigmatic works, a throwback to his social narratives, and something of a ‘problem picture’: Eyewitnesses. It’s nighttime in a living room. Two fishermen stand in front of a door, still wearing their soaked and soiled oilskins, and appear to have entered the room straight after coming ashore from the sea. One stares in shock towards the viewer, the other looks down and away. Both appear full of unease, silent and immobile.

At the right, a young woman is standing, leaning forward towards the men, as if listening to them. She looks anxious, with her hands clasped in front of her chest. Behind her an oil lamp burns brightly, there are the leaves of a large potted plant, and a couple of paintings on the wall behind a large blue settee.

One possible reading is that the men have brought news of the loss at sea of the woman’s husband, an event of which they were eyewitnesses.

In the coming years Krohg was to return to the sea in his paintings.

References

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.

During his summer stay at Skagen in 1883, Christian Krohg documented life in this remote artists’ colony in Denmark, and turned to develop some new themes that were to dominate his painting in the coming years.

From the sick child came a series of works showing exhausted or worried mothers with their children, of which Mother and Child (1883) is an early example. A young infant lies asleep in their crib, their exhausted mother fallen asleep on the head of her bed, her hand still resting where it had been rocking the child to sleep.

Around those figures and furniture, the room is barren and clinical, and the mother’s clothes plain, simple and dark grey. This follows a trend among the Skagen painters to paint motifs like this that had been popular with Dutch artists in the past.

Later that year, Krohg opened the theme that was to make him almost infamous, that of the fallen woman and prostitution. Madeleine (1883) shows another barren bedroom, here with a young woman sat on a thin mattress on a basic iron bedstead. She is dressed for bed, and the sheets and pillow behind her show that her single bed has recently been occupied. Her body and head are bowed, forehead propped on her left hand, her eyes shielded from the viewer. In her other hand she holds a small mirror (or possibly a hairbrush). Her hair, though, is braided and tied back.

Krohg hints that she is falling into, or already engaged, in prostitution. We are left to speculate as to the cause of her grief, what has just happened, and what lies ahead for her.

In January 1884, Oda Engelhardt (née Othilia Pauline Christine Lasson, 1860-1935) enrolled as a pupil in Krohg’s art school. Oda and Krohg’s first child was born the following year, and they married in 1888, after she had divorced. Their relationship was quite openly open: Oda, Christian, and Hans Jæger were in a love triangle in the months immediately prior to the Krohg’s marriage, and Oda is reputed to have had affairs with most of the people in their circle apart from Edvard Munch. Oda was an accomplished artist in her own right, although her paintings were sadly eclipsed by her image as a ‘princess’ in their Bohemian circle.

Look Ahead, Bergen Harbour (1884) is an unusual painting from Krohg’s maritime series, this time set inside the sheltered waters of Bergen Harbour. A young man in shirtsleeves and wearing a trilby is rowing a small boat towards the middle of the harbour, and looks over his shoulder at the traffic that lies ahead of him.

This appears to have been prompted by one of Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings of boating activities near his estate at Yerres, Oarsman in a Top Hat (1877-78), below.

Mother at her Child’s Bed (1884) returns indoors, to the theme of motherhood, sickness, and sleep. In another barren bedroom, a girl lies asleep in her bed, with her mother sat anxiously at the bedside. The mother is dressed plainly in a prim dark blue jacket, with her hair plaited and wound up in a coif. The light coming from a window behind the viewer makes it clear that the curtains are open and that it’s likely to be daytime rather than night.

From the theme of fatigue and sleep came another development, in Tired (1885). The young woman seen here is no mother, neither is she in or near a bed. Instead, she is a seamstress, one of the many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, that had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work.

Home work as a seamstress was seen as the beginning of the descent into prostitution. The received story was that the paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient, and women sought alternatives. Prostitution had officially become a criminal offence in Norway in 1842, but was tolerated in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) from 1840, with the introduction of police and medical supervision of women sex-workers.

For much of 1885, Krohg was in Belgium at the Exposition Universelle in Antwerp, where he exhibited, and he also had his first solo exhibition in Oslo.

Just before Christmas 1886, Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is contemporary prostitution in Norway, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. Krohg was found guilty of the offence the following March and fined, although the police were only able to seize 439 of the first 1600 copies to go into circulation.

At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87). He also painted several other scenes from the book.

In the novel, Albertine starts as a poor seamstress, who is mistaken for a prostitute by the police officer in charge of the section controlling prostitutes. He plies her with alcohol then rapes her. She is summoned to be inspected by the police doctor, whose examination further violates her, making her think that she is destined to be a prostitute, and that is exactly what happens.

Albertine is not the prominent woman in the centre looking directly at the viewer. Krohg’s heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a motley line of women from a wide range of situations. At the right, in the corner of the room, is another country girl with flushed cheeks. Others are apparently more advanced in their careers, and stare at Albertine, whose profiled face is barely visible from behind her headscarf. Barring the way to the surgery door, and in control of the proceedings, is a policeman.

The wide range of dress and appearance among the women is striking.

Towards the end of his career, Krohg painted this looser and more sketchy version of Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1917), in which the women stare more pointedly at Albertine, who is about to go through the open door leading into the doctor’s examination room. Krohg said at the time that he thought this was a better composition, and less theatrical, joking that his earlier masterpiece had been a sketch for this later painting.

Most surprising is the fact that Krohg and fellow left-wingers and liberals weren’t campaigning for the liberalisation of prostitution, but for it to be banned altogether, arguing that enforcement of the criminal law would limit the numbers of women entering the trade. This is, of course, the exact opposite of many later arguments in favour of its decriminalisation.

Braiding her Hair (1888) is a variation on the theme of motherhood in poverty, and reminiscent of much older Dutch and other paintings of mothers combing their child’s hair for nits and lice. Both the mother and her daughter face away from the viewer, rendering them anonymous, and both wear plain old clothing in a barren room.

For much of 1888, Krohg was out of Norway, in Copenhagen for the first half, including a visit to Paris, then went on to Skagen for the summer.

Back in Skagen, Krohg resumed his almost clinical account of the Gaihede family, in this portrait of Ane Gaihede (1888).

As her husband rests in Niels Gaihede’s Afternoon Nap (1888), Ane sits knitting in the shadows to the right.

In the autumn of 1888, with her divorce completed, Christian Krohg married his former pupil Oda Engelhardt in Oslo. It was time for him to paint his own family.

References

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.