By the piano. The artist's wife and children

Viggo Johansen grew up in Copenhagen. At the age of 17, he began his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he was regarded as highly talented. He was therefore given training in figure painting, which at the time was considered the finest branch of painting. However, he never managed to graduate, a fate which he shared with several other famous artists, including fellow painter Michael Ancher. Viggo Johansen went to Skagen for the first time in the summer of 1875 at the invitation of Ancher. In Skagen, Johansen met Anna Ancher’s cousin Martha.. The two were engaged later that summer and married a few years later. In the 1880s, Viggo Johansen spent his summers in Skagen with Martha and a rapidly growing flock of children. The family rented Madam Bendsen's house in Skagen's West Town. While they lived there, Viggo Johansen made several fine landscape paintings of the area, but his family was his favourite subject. For a couple of years at around the turn of the century, the Johansens stopped visiting Skagen, due to a disagreement with P.S. Krøyer and his wife, Marie. During this period, Johansen continued working on beautiful, intimate paintings like this one, with ordinary and honest, yet very charming and poetic, scenes from their daily life in Copenhagen.