Walking Trip, Jutland

Two young hikers have stopped in the middle of a sandy track across the Jutland heath to talk with a man driving an ox cart. One traveler leans on his walking stick with a pipe in his mouth, his plaid blanket slung over his shoulder; another tips back his straw hat, mid-sentence, hands raised as if explaining the way. A third companion has simply sat down in the heather beside his basket and bundle, clearly the most tired of the group. The cart driver, oddly formal in a black coat and tall silk hat, perches on the edge of his wagon while his two oxen wait with the patience of animals who have done this walk many times before.

Frants Henningsen (1850 to 1908) belonged to a generation of Danish realists who preferred ordinary people and everyday situations to grand historical subjects. Walking tours across the heath were a genuine craze among young Danes in the late 1800s, a cheap summer holiday and something close to a patriotic ritual, since the vast heaths of Jutland had become a symbol of the nation after the loss of Schleswig in 1864. Henningsen keeps the drama low and the colors low too, mostly browns, dusty pinks of flowering heather, and a wide band of pale evening sky. The horizon sits very low and very flat, which is exactly what walking in that part of Denmark feels like: a great deal of sky and a track that seems to go on forever.