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.