Sending for the Doctor

Sending for the Doctor of 1880, in the Trondheim Art Museum, depicts a moment of domestic crisis in a Norwegian rural or working-class household — someone is ill, and a messenger must be dispatched to fetch the physician. The subject belongs to the tradition of narrative Realist genre painting that depicted the social realities of working-class life: illness, poverty, domestic hardship. Krohg painted this in the same period as his fisherman and net-mending subjects, when he was assembling a comprehensive visual record of Norwegian working-class experience. The subject had precedents in British Victorian genre painting — Luke Fildes's The Doctor of 1891 would engage similar concerns — but Krohg's approach reflects Scandinavian Realism's specific social consciousness. The Trondheim Art Museum, Norway's third-largest city, holds significant examples of Norwegian historical and contemporary art.

The narrative genre scene requires multiple figures in a domestic interior, each conveying their role through posture and expression. Light in the interior likely emphasizes the bed-ridden figure and the urgent dispatcher.