Die Männer der Industrie

Kroyer is loved for sunlit beaches and long summer evenings at Skagen, so this crowded room of dark suits comes as a surprise. He painted it between 1903 and 1904 as a portrait of the men driving Denmark's industrial rise. Among the faces are Carl Jacobsen, the brewer behind Carlsberg, and Valdemar Poulsen, the engineer who had just worked out how to record sound on magnetic wire. It was a hard commission for the painter. In these years Kroyer's eyesight was failing and his mind was troubled by long spells of illness, and he had only a few years left to live. The gathering he assembled here never actually met in one room. He built the group from separate studies, arranging Denmark's captains of industry into a single company.