Les Oies

A flock of white geese grazes and preens across a sunlit Danish meadow, their necks arching over the pale grass while a few wade at the edge of a bright pool beneath a luminous sky. Theodor Esbern Philipsen, the leading Danish Impressionist, painted this pastoral in 1897, bringing together the broken colour of French Impressionism with the plein-air naturalism of his Danish teachers; in 1884–85 he had hosted Paul Gauguin in Copenhagen, and the Frenchman’s advice — to carry the small colour sketch into the finished picture — stayed with him for the rest of his life. Philipsen’s sun-filled landscapes and animal studies made him the most influential Danish landscape painter of his generation. This canvas, a gift to the Art Institute of Chicago in honor of its curator Douglas Druick, joined the collection in 2014. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.