Painting Technological Progress: P. S. Kroyer's The Industrialists

摘要

On the third floor of the Danish Museum of National History hangs the monumental collective portrait The Industrialists (fig. 1). The work was commissioned in 1903 by Gustav Adolph Hagemann, director of the Polyteknisk Laereanstalt (Denmark's technical university) and an influential Danish businessman and engineer. The artist is Peder Severin Kroyer, the most well known—and certainly the most expensive—Danish painter of the 1880s and the 1890s.