Convalescence

A boy sits in a worn armchair, head bent over a book, while another child lies propped on pillows nearby, still too weak to do much more than watch. The Danish painter Frants Henningsen made sickrooms and hard luck his subject matter, and this one is stocked with the small evidence of a long illness: a brown medicine bottle on the little table, a spoon resting on a saucer, and beside them a single red rose stuck in a glass of water. Somebody in this household thought to bring a flower. That detail does more work than any expression on the patient's face.

Henningsen belonged to the generation of Danish artists who turned away from polished historical scenes in the 1880s and painted ordinary people instead, often the poor and the grieving. His better known pictures show funerals and abandoned mothers, subjects meant to prick the conscience of comfortable viewers. This one is quieter in ambition and looser in handling, closer to a study than a finished statement, with the green wall barely described and the bedding built up in quick strokes of white and grey. What holds it together is the light from the window at the left, which falls across the sheets and leaves the reading boy's face in a warm half shadow, two children keeping each other company through a dull afternoon.