Albertine dans la salle d'attente du médecin de la police

In 1886 Christian Krohg published a novel called Albertine, about a poor Kristiania seamstress pushed into prostitution. The police seized it the day it went on sale, and the Norwegian supreme court fined him. So he made his argument again, this time on a canvas more than three metres wide. It shows the waiting room of the police doctor, where the city's registered prostitutes were required by law to appear for examination. Albertine stands in the crowd at the left, still in her own plain clothes, not yet one of the seated women in their finery. Krohg hired real prostitutes to pose for it. He was demanding that the state end the whole system of regulation, and the painting kept the fight in front of the public after the book had been taken away.