One hundred and fifty years ago a group of French artists staged their first independent exhibition in Paris and a radical movement called Impressionism was born. In July of that year, Danish artist Michael Ancher (1849–1927) joined Karl Madsen (1855–1938) in Skagen, Denmark, a fishing village located on the country’s northernmost point.

As with the exhibition in Paris, Ancher’s arrival there marked the beginning of an artistic revolution that would upend the academic realism and traditional modes, subjects, and locales of Danish Golden Age art. Inspired by growing discourses of nationalism and naturalism, Danish artists turned to scenes of everyday life, and especially of labor, with local men, women, and children featuring prominently in their work. Indeed, as Skagen developed into a thriving art colony in the late nineteenth century, labor had become a defining feature of Danish painting, paving the way for other artists—including Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) and L.A. Ring (1854–1933)—to contemplate the art of work and the work of art.