Simony Jensen

Simony Jensen (dates uncertain, active c.1895–1910) was a Danish genre painter who specialised in humorous and anecdotal scenes of inn and monastery life, in a tradition derived from seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish tavern painting. The nine paintings in this batch—At the gentleman's club, Cellar scene with happy monks, Three men in an inn, Merry monks at a table, Monks, Man and woman reading a letter, Rural interior with a woman knitting and cats, Two women on a terrace in Italy, View of a lake with swans—show a painter comfortable with the conventions of light-hearted genre painting: monks eating and drinking, men at clubs and inns, women in domestic scenes. His style appears to be warm-toned and competent, suited to the anecdotal subjects he favoured. This tradition of 'merry monk' and tavern painting had a ready market among Danish middle-class collectors in the late nineteenth century.

Jensen's genre paintings are warm and anecdotal: comfortable colour, conventional compositions, and figures engaged in leisurely or convivial activity. His style is in the tradition of nineteenth-century genre painting derived from the Dutch golden age without great personal distinction.

Jensen is a representative figure in the Danish tradition of light-hearted genre painting, producing work that suited middle-class collecting tastes in the late nineteenth century. His work documents a popular artistic tradition that existed alongside more ambitious directions in Danish painting.