a desire to offend. Still a beneficial sense of standing with-
out the pale of society and of being free Bohemians sustained
their longing for independence. On the whole, they were
most successful in maintaining themselves artistically so long
as naturalism still awaited recognition. The wave of polit-
ical and intellectual radicalism that swept over the country
bore them up. When the reaction came, the weaker char-
acters among them were washed into back eddies and
remained floating there. Others of their number, more
adaptable and fitted to survive, shaped a fresh course at the
breaking of the new day.

Among the intermediate men Wentzel is the most impor-
tant and the first who assumed a leading position. Nils
Gustav Wentzel was born in Christiania in 1859. He made
his debut as a painter with a picture from his father's car-
penter shop, which the principal connoisseurs of Kunst-
foreningen judged to be too realistic and therefore refused
to show at the exhibitions of the society. It was the rejec-
tion of this work that drew attention to the young painter
and made him known, for the refusal of his picture precipi-
tated open warfare between the artists and the reactionary
directors of the society. And it was on this occasion that
the artists in 1882 instituted a systematic strike against
Kunstforeningen, which lasted about two years and resulted
in victory for the artists.

Wentzel masterpiece, The Breakfast, now in the Na-
tional Gallery, is from the same year, 1882. The picture is
the most skilfully painted and the most authentic example
of milieu portraiture in Norwegian art. With a keenness
of vision that captures all details the artist gives us a glimpse
of a workingman's simple home in its morning negligé. The
room with its lilac-grey wallpaper, the woman in her night-
dress cutting bread, the boy gulping coffee from a cup while
holding a piece of bread and butter in his hand, the break-
fast table without a cloth, the sooty copper kettle and the
flowered dishes--it is all there and it is all presented with
brilliant verisimilitude. Further, the interior revealing the
trundle bed packed with bedclothes, the photographs on the

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