The stories behind the paintings

Everything a family owns fits on one patch of snow. A chest of drawers, a mattress and pillows, a chair, a washtub, a coffee pot, a framed picture propped against the pile. Three generations of women stand beside it in their shawls, while a few steps away the father, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, pleads with a policeman who is reading from a sheet of paper. Erik Henningsen’s Evicted ( Sat ud , 1892), now in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, is one of the great images of poverty in nineteenth-century European painting, and it was painted on a real Copenhagen street. Erik Henningsen, Evicted (Sat ud), 1892. Oil on canvas, 158 × 220.5 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS1454). Image via the Sapiens Verbum print shop. 🖼️ Get this painting as a print → Quick facts Artist: Erik Henningsen (1855–1930) Title: Sat ud (Evicted), also known as Evicted Tenants Date: 1892 (signed and dated lower left) Medium: Oil on canvas, 158 ...

Dusk is a job, not a metaphor. In Erik Henningsen's The Lamplighter (c. 1895), a man leans into a street lamp with a pole and a flame while the city keeps walking. Cobblestones, coats, and half-lit faces fill the middle distance; the lamp is the hinge between day and night. This is Copenhagen street life painted by a Social Realist who knew how to make ordinary labour look monumental without turning it into a sermon. Erik Henningsen, The Lamplighter (old street lamps at dusk), c. 1895. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Image via the Sapiens Verbum print shop. 🖼️ Get this painting as a print → Quick facts Artist: Erik Ludvig Henningsen (1855–1930) Date: c. 1895 Medium: Oil on canvas Collection: Private collection Notable fact: Henningsen made his name with Social Realist scenes of Copenhagen — workers, the poor, and the lighter textures of street life — around the same decade as this lamplighter The Man Who Turns the City On Before electric grids m...