Malkepladsen ved Dyrehavegård

The museum dates the canvas to 1895 and acquired it in 1954. It has been shown in Koloristiske gennembrud. Tre forudsætninger for moderne dansk maleri: Philipsen, Larsen Stevns, Hoppe at Holstebro Kunstmuseum in 1996–97, and in Europe, Russia, Europe at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 2007. The museum’s documentation records it in Finn Terman Frederiksen’s catalogue of the painter’s work, Med solen i øjnene: en Theodor Philipsen-studie, as no. 409, and in that scholar’s 2016 monograph Theodor Philipsen — en traditionsbevidst nyskaber; a 1999 study of Nordic painting reproduces it under the variant title Malkepladsen ved Mejlgård. Theodor Philipsen found his artistic identity in the open-air painting of the 1880s, and through his engagement with French Impressionism he was of great importance to the generations of Danish colourists who followed him. He grew up in a wealthy Copenhagen merchant’s household — his father came from one of the Jewish families of the city’s bourgeoisie and the home was marked by freethinking, rational argument and a wide cultural education — and he and his brothers were taken on educational journeys around Europe as children. His ruling interest was animals, which he drew and modelled eagerly from boyhood, and he accordingly trained in agriculture with an uncle at Højagergård; only in the 1860s, through one of his brothers, did he come to know the painter Hans Smidth, and that acquaintance helped settle his decision to become an artist himself. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).