Portrait of the artist's foster father the zoologian and professor Henrik Nicolai Krøyer

Peder Severin Krøyer's 1872 portrait of his foster father Henrik Nicolai Krøyer — the zoologist and professor who raised him after he was brought to Copenhagen from his birthplace in Norway — is among his most personally significant early works. Henrik Nicolai Krøyer was a distinguished naturalist who had significantly expanded Danish knowledge of marine zoology, and his portrait situates him as a figure of intellectual authority. The relationship between the young painter and the scientist who provided his stable childhood was clearly one of affection and respect. This early portrait, made when Krøyer was seventeen or eighteen, demonstrates the prodigious facility that his teachers would cultivate. The painting demonstrates how intimately the personal and the professional were intertwined in his early development.

The portrait of his foster father shows Krøyer's early academic training in careful tonal modelling and respectful likeness. The face is rendered with patient observation, the older man's features given the gravitas appropriate to a scientist of standing. The composition follows conventional male portrait format, with controlled lighting from a specific source.