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.

Next month we will commemorate the centenary of the death of one of the most influential Nordic artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian Krohg (1852–1925). Although he never achieved great international fame, he was a key figure in the artistic development and life of Edvard Munch, was the first professor and director of the Oslo State Academy of Art, a widely-read author and critic, and a social and political campaigner.

Krohg’s background was anything but poor: his grandfather had been a government minister, and his father was a lawyer and statesman. However, his mother died when he was only eight years old, and the oldest of his four sisters, Marie, assumed responsibility for running the household and bringing him up. His family expected him to study law, but his aspiration was to become a painter. The compromise was that he studied law for four years at university, and attended a drawing school.

In 1873, with the death of his father and the completion of his law studies in Oslo, he went to study painting in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he was taught by the great Norwegian landscape artist Hans Gude among others. In 1875, he transferred to the Royal Academy in Berlin, where he was inspired to become a ‘naturalist’ by Max Klinger and Georg Brandes.

Among the earliest of Krohg’s surviving paintings is his Portrait of Lucy Parr Egeberg, 1876, a demonstration of his skills in line and form.

In 1879, on the encouragement of the artist Frits Thaulow, Krohg travelled to Skagen at the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland) in Denmark, where he joined the group of Nordic painters there who were working largely in Impressionist style. Krohg started his first major project to document the lives of the Gaihede family of Skagen over the next decade.

His early painting of Ane Gaihede as a Woman Cutting Bread (1879) was the start of his social realism. Krohg documents her in almost ethnographic detachment. She is aligned in profile, against an almost bare wall, perfectly framed at three-quarter length.

Another major work from this period began his career-long series of paintings of working seamen, in Port Side! (1879). Krohg started this when he was still in Berlin, and completed it when at Skagen that first summer. It was one of two of his paintings exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1882, and although it didn’t attract much critical attention, its reviews were positive.

Krohg crops this closer, leaving just a few millimetres beyond the tips of his fingers. He adds the dynamics by ensuring that no lines are anywhere near horizontal or vertical, and you can almost feel the heel of the ship’s deck under your feet. The seaman’s oilskins have been patched repeatedly, and have deeply ingrained grime.

In Niels Gaihede Netting (c 1880), another of his Skagen series, he shows the Gaihedes together, with Niels at work on his fishing net, and Ane in the background, staring sternly. Their surroundings are less spartan, but still frugal: the furniture is basic wood, and has seen better days, probably long ago. A clock and some sheets of prints taken from a magazine are the only objects on the blank white wall behind. Niels wears large wooden working clogs, and his trousers have been patched many times.

After his time in Skagen, Krohg started teaching at an art school for women, which in common with others across Europe was trying to address the growing demand from budding women artists, and the conservative attitudes persisting in major academies at the time. Perhaps influenced by this experience, he opened another theme which he was to explore repeatedly, that of illness in the family, with his Sick Girl (1881). The sickness in question is tuberculosis, then prevalent throughout Norway and much of the rest of Europe, King Death as it was nicknamed at the time.

The girl’s face indicates that her end is drawing near. On her lap is a single pale pink rose, its leaves dropped like tears down the blanket covering her legs. He again crops the image closely. This was 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.

In 1881, Krohg met the Skagen artist Peder Severin Krøyer, and went to live in Paris for a year. He was particularly influenced by the Impressionists, Edouard Manet, and Gustave Courbet, together with the social realism of Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage, and Léon Lhermitte.

Among the Impressionists, he seems to have been most attracted to the work of Gustave Caillebotte. Krohg’s Portrait of the Swedish Painter Karl Nordström (1882) (above) appears to have been motivated by Caillebotte’s Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880), below, which in turn was developed from Caillebotte’s earlier painting of his brother as a Young Man at His Window (1875). Curiously, Krohg didn’t paint this in Paris, but towards the end of his time in France, in the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, in the Spring of 1882.

Perhaps just before Krohg went to Grez, he may have visited Normandy, to paint this interesting little view of a Village Street in Normandy (1882). Its curved recession of umbrellas with disembodied legs is striking.

Krohg then went to stay in Skagen over much of the next couple of years. His sailing painting Hard Alee (1882) was exhibited in the Salon in Paris that year, and was one of the silver wedding gifts from the Norwegian people to King Oscar II and Queen Sophia of Nassau, who were also the king and queen of Sweden, as the countries were in union at the time.

This time his seaman is sailing a small yacht singlehanded. The tiller, his arms, and a line he is holding, trace a bold and dynamic zigzag down the centre of the canvas. Again Krohg is careful to ensure that there is only one horizontal (or vertical) line, that of the horizon.

Krohg’s paintings from this period at Skagen form an absorbing account of life in the artists’ colony there, and several are displayed in the excellent Skagen Museum there. Charles Lundh in Conversation with Christian Krohg (1883) shows this Norwegian painter who lived from 1856-1908, and Krohg’s legs. Lundh stayed in Skagen that summer, living in a house with Krohg, then painted in Persia for five years. Krohg visited Paris again in the Spring of 1883, then returned to Skagen for the summer.

This Self-portrait (1883) of him clutching his huge smoking pipe with a well-used palette in the other hand, shows him at the age of about 31.

It contrasts with The Day After, Self-portrait (1883) which reflects the intensity of the social events held in Skagen, a true confluence of spirits.

References

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