Krohg painted this working couple at Skagen, a village on the coast of Jutland in Denmark that hosted an influential artists’ colony, in the summer of 1879. His models were the fisherman Niels Christian Gaihede (1816–1890) and his wife, Ane Gaihede (1812–1904). Renouncing the sentimentality associated with peasant subjects then current in Nordic art, Krohg gave vent to an insistent objectivity that struck contemporaries as idiosyncratic to a fault when this work was exhibited in Oslo soon after it was completed. This criticism prompted Krohg to paint a more restrained version (National Museum, Oslo).
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