Un tumulus funéraire de l'Antiquité près de Raklev sur Refsnæs

In 1839 the critic Niels Høyen was urging young Danish painters to stop looking to Italy and find their country in its own fields and old stones. Lundbye, just 21, took that to heart on the windswept Refsnæs peninsula, which still held a great many ancient burial mounds. He set this one high against the sky, so the land falls away behind it and the small canvas gains a surprising depth. The tumulus covers a Bronze Age grave, and he wanted a Dane standing before it to feel that reach of time. At its foot he put ordinary things, a field and grazing sheep, farmland grown up around a grave older than any written record of Denmark.