Portrait of the Norwegian painter Eilif Peterssen.

Peder Severin Krøyer's 1875 portrait of his Norwegian friend and fellow painter Eilif Peterssen documents the close-knit world of Scandinavian painters in the 1870s, who formed networks of mutual support and friendship while studying in Munich, Düsseldorf, and Paris. Peterssen was a significant Norwegian painter known for his portraits and Orientalist subjects; Krøyer's depiction of him reflects their shared artistic world. These painter-to-painter portraits are among the most revealing documents of the Scandinavian artistic community abroad — informal, observational, lacking the social performance of commissioned portraiture. The Lillehammer Art Museum holds this as a document of the Nordic artistic community.

Krøyer's portrait of Peterssen is likely an informal, direct study: the sitter rendered with the attentiveness of a fellow professional who understood the subject from the inside. The handling would be more spontaneous than in a formal commission — the mutual knowledge between painter and painter creating a different dynamic than between artist and unknown sitter.