Christian Krohg

In 1886 the Norwegian painter and writer Christian Krohg published a novel called Albertine, about a young seamstress driven into prostitution by poverty and the police. The authorities seized it the day it appeared. Krohg answered with a large painting of the same subject, Albertine in the police doctor's waiting room, and crowds queued to see it.

Krohg was the leading Norwegian realist of his generation, and he used art as social argument, painting seamstresses, sailors, and the sick poor with plain sympathy. He was also a sharp journalist and a generous teacher.

Among the young painters he encouraged in the Paris of the 1880s was Edvard Munch, then still finding his way, who never forgot the older man's support. Krohg later ran the new art academy in Kristiania, today's Oslo. One of his most loved pictures is gentler than the scandals, a grandmother bent over a cradle, called Mother and Child.