Bildnis der Familie Hirschsprung

Heinrich Hirschsprung made his money in cigars, and he spent a good part of it on young Danish painters. For four years he had paid for Kroyer to travel and study abroad, and Kroyer came home in 1881 fluent in the loose, bright brushwork he had seen in Paris in the work of Manet. This portrait was partly a thank-you. Hirschsprung's wife Pauline wanted the whole family gathered before the boys were sent off to school in Switzerland, so Kroyer set them on the sunlit terrace of the family's summer house north of Copenhagen. The father stands a little apart at the left, the children spread across the balcony in the easy poses of people used to having the painter around. The cigar fortune that paid for all of this eventually became a museum, and the Hirschsprung collection is still where this picture hangs.