The River Sorteaa near Mejlgaard Manor, Jutland

The River Sorteaa near Mejlgård Manor, Jutland, painted in 1894, returns Philipsen to the Danish countryside a decade after his Italian and Tunisian journeys, bringing a more developed technical repertoire to familiar northern terrain. Mejlgård Manor in Jutland had provided subjects for Philipsen before — the Milking Place canvas dates from 1884 — and the return in 1894 reflects the sustained relationship Danish painters of this generation maintained with the landscape estates of Jutland. By 1894 Philipsen was fully engaged with the Impressionist approach he had been developing across his Italian, Tunisian, and Danish work, and the relatively slow-moving Sorteaa offered him the same kind of reflective, atmospheric water surface he had studied in Italy. The Statens Museum for Kunst holds this as part of a comprehensive collection of his Danish landscape work.

Danish river light in 1894 receives Philipsen's mature Impressionist handling — broken color, attention to sky reflection on water, sensitive discrimination between sunlit and shadowed passages. The low, relatively flat Jutland terrain surrounding the river produces a horizon that compresses sky and land into intimate relationship. Paint application is more confident than his early Saltholm work.