En landevej

The museum keeps only the Danish title — En landevej, “A Road” — and dates the canvas 1893. It measures 200 × 263 cm and is painted in oil on canvas; the museum holds it in the Royal Collection of Paintings and Sculpture. In the gallery’s own account of the painter this is the picture it names for the social-religious direction he took from the German painter Fritz von Uhde, and it follows there the two landmarks of the decade before: his debut Fra landsbyen of 1882, in which a farmer leaving for America takes leave of his mother and his sweetheart, and Udslidt of 1889, in which a farmer has fallen in the field while his wife calls for help — the pictures through which he became one of the very few Danish artists of his generation to take up the social aspect of French realism, after Millet and Bastien-Lepage.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1946) trained first as a modeller and went over at once to painting. Like his fellow Academy student L.A. Ring he came from a village milieu, and the countryside and the people who worked it stayed his subject from the earliest years; the museum judges the considered composition and the tender, mild colour of those early works his strongest, and places him centrally in Danish art as a social realist. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).