Aftenselskab i mit hjem

The canvas is inscribed V. Johansen 1899 and was bought from the artist at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition of that year, where it was shown as cat. 590. The museum keeps the title in Danish — Aftenselskab i mit hjem, “An Evening Party in My Home” — and in the painter’s own dossier the picture is entered as Aftenselskab i kunstnerens hjem. In 2025–26 it hung in Hos mig. Skagensmaleren Viggo Johansen at Den Hirschsprungske Samling, Ribe Kunstmuseum and Skagens Museum, and it is reproduced in Anne-Mette Villumsen’s book of that exhibition and discussed in Louise Rasmussen’s Frem i lyset (both 2025). Earlier literature includes Sigurd Schultz’s Dansk Genremaleri (1928) and the museum’s own 1917 Fortegnelse over den danske Afdelings Malerier og Skulpturer (cat. 333), as well as Peter Michael Hornung’s Realismen (1993), Thomas Lederballe’s essay in Drømmetid (2004) and Malene Rehr’s Tolkninger af det intime (2007).

Viggo Johansen (1851–1935) is one of the painters of Skagen, which he first visited in 1875 and where he worked alongside Anna and Michael Ancher after his marriage in 1880 to Anna’s cousin, Martha Møller. He spent the 1870s between Copenhagen, Hornbæk, Dragør and Skagen, and from 1890, settled in Copenhagen, he made figures in an interior — most often his wife and children — his central subject; the museum describes that group of canvases, to which this one belongs, as among his most convincing achievements, and he was later professor and then director of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).