The little Gaihede Girl

Christian Krohg's portrait of the little Gaihede girl at Skagen — a member of the same fishing family that appeared repeatedly in Michael Ancher's work — captures one of the community's youngest members with the directness and psychological sensitivity that characterized the Norwegian painter's work with children. Krohg, a major figure of Scandinavian Realism and a tireless advocate for socially engaged art, brought to child subjects the same refusal of sentimentality he applied to adult poverty and prostitution in his social realist works. A fisherman's child was, in his view, as worthy of attention as any bourgeois sitter.

The girl's face is rendered with direct, searching attention: the specific roundness of a child's features, the quality of northern light on fair skin. Krohg avoids the rosy idealization of Victorian child portraiture, preferring the slightly grave, self-contained quality of a child observed rather than performed.