A Winter's Day on Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen

Although a pupil of the Copenhagen Academy of Fine Arts, Paul Fischer largely rejected the traditional teaching of the national Romantic school and followed the lessons of a group of younger artists such as Kroyer, Locher and Tuxen, whose stylistic tendencies and subject matter were heavily influenced by their travels and studies in Paris in the late 1870s and 1880s and who subsequently heralded a new era in Danish art. Despite the immense influence that Parisian artistic trends had in the 1880s and 1890s on the development of Danish art, Fischer remains one of the most quintessentially Danish artists of his time. Inspired largely by scenes of daily life in Copenhagen, his street scenes display the vitality and a sense of immediacy in their subject matter and execution that many of his contemporaries were seeking abroad. His paintings provide quiet windows on the everyday.
The fast changing world of the late 19th and early 20th century provided Fischer with endless subjects, in this instance trams and other vechicles. Fischer's skills of composition are best seen in his great street scenes such as A Winter's Day on Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen, where the vibrant urban landscape is presented as a celebration of industrial development.