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.

The overwhelming majority of paintings of interiors show rooms we might aspire to. In this last of the series, I show some we’d all hope to avoid, those of the poor and destitute. Although never really popular as motifs, there have always been a few artists prepared to tackle the ills and inequalities in society, and this became increasingly frequent in the 1880s.

In common with other paintings of inns in the Dutch Golden Age, David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50) is set in a dingy room in a rough tavern. Drawing on their clay pipes and with glasses of beer in hand, a group of men appear completely absorbed in gambling their large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is one of the earliest artists to have paid particular attention to the poor. The Young Beggar, painted in about 1645, shows a young boy squatting in a tiny bare nook in a building. By his filthy feet is a bag full of rotting fruit, and some sort of worms, which apparently form his diet.

François-Auguste Biard’s undated sketchy view In a Mountain Hut may have been made in front of the motif, onto paper. This is unusually social realist for this artist, showing the abject poverty and spartan conditions of many who lived in the more remote areas of France at that time.

It was the Naturalist paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the early 1880s that brought depictions of the poor to success in the Salon.

Typical of his portraits is The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers), one of his last paintings, completed in 1883. This young chimneysweep sitting in his tiny hovel with a stray cat and kitten has the air of authenticity. The hand grasping that slab of bread is still black with soot. Bastien painted this in his home village in northern France.

Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation (1880-85) depicts prostitution in the city of Catania on the east coast of the island of Sicily, Italy. The man settling his bill is only seen by his hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade.

We remain in the poor quarter of Catania for Gandolfo’s The Last Coin (c 1880-85). A young woman, who has been spinning, sits on an old chest and takes the last money from her purse, presumably to pay for some milk to fill her blue and white jug. Her family stand with their heads bowed in the gloom behind.

Vincent van Gogh’s early paintings of Nuenen, such as The Potato Eaters from April 1885, depict poor peasant families, here eating inside their dingy cottage lit by a single oil lamp.

Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 shows a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies arriving at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.