The Norwegian painter, novelist, critic, journalist, and professor Christian Krohg (1825?1925) is regarded as one of the most avant-garde naturalist artists at work in the Nordic countries during the 1880s. His paintings of workers, fisher families, the poor, the sick, and prostitutes shocked the sensibilities of his time. In 1886, he also published the novel Albertine about a young seamstress who turned to a life of prostitution. The day after its publication, police seized the book, and Krohg was punished because of the book's sexual content. It was scandalous! Krohg became a hero'both to those who thought prostitution was an evil and to others who believed in freedom of speech and press in Norway.In this new book about Krohg, the ambition has been to lift Krohg out of the Norwegian sociocultural context, and place him and his art projects in an international perspective. This book seeks to demonstrate that Christian Krohg was one of the most Zolaesque painters on the European art scene. Sjstad elucidates this by examining Zola's own theories and their reception in Scandinavian intellectual circles, and ways in which Krohg interpreted the French author's methods and aims.

In addition, Sjstad also investigates Krohg's different art projects in view of other naturalist thinkers such as Claude Bernard and Hippolyte Taine, with Krohg's art treated herein as ?experiments? in which aesthetics, politics, and science meet. This first book in English on one of the central Nordic painters will demonstrate that Krohg's art made a strikingly original contribution to European naturalism.