Harald Slott-Møller

In 1891 a group of young Danish artists, tired of waiting on the verdicts of the official salon at Charlottenborg, opened a show of their own and called it Den Frie Udstilling, The Free Exhibition. Harald Slott-Moller was among the founders, still in his twenties. He had trained at the Copenhagen Academy and then for three years under Peder Severin Kroyer, the great painter of Danish summer light, before turning toward something moodier and more deliberate.

His first real attention, in 1888, had come from a crowded scene of poor people waiting in a charity doctor's office. Soon after he moved toward Symbolism, decorative and dreamlike, with polished surfaces and a debt to the English Pre-Raphaelites, and he worked in ceramics as well as paint. That same year he married the painter Agnes Rambusch, who took the name Agnes Slott-Moller and became a noted Symbolist herself, drawn to Danish history and folklore.

The couple stayed fixtures of the Free Exhibition for years. Harald died in 1937, a few months after Agnes. One of his best-loved paintings shows her seated on a bright northern midsummer night, looking out over the Vejle Fjord, and it hangs today in the Vejle art museum.