Dalla Borsa di Copenaghen

Peder Severin Krøyer is best remembered for luminous evenings on the beach at Skagen, so this crowded hall of businessmen can come as a surprise. He finished it in 1895 for the Great Hall of the Copenhagen stock exchange, a room the country's financiers had just refurbished as a monument to themselves. Fifty of them stand here, each a recognisable portrait, gathered under the exchange's arches during the decades when Denmark was turning into a modern industrial nation. The idea had come years earlier from the engineer Gustav Hagemann while another tycoon, C. F. Tietgen, sat for Krøyer. The hardest part was purely practical, arranging 50 individually posed men into one room that still looks like people who happened to meet.