Vilhelm Groth

Georg Vilhelm Arnold Groth (Copenhagen, 1842-1899) was a Danish landscape painter who trained at the drawing school of Frederik Ferdinand Helsted and later at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in 1866, the same year he held his first exhibition. He matters because he pushed Danish painting in a new direction.

Between 1872 and 1878 he made several study trips to Italy and France, notably a stay in Paris from 1875 to 1876. That year he published Dansk Kunst i Forhold til Udlandets, in which he disagreed with the respected painter Vilhelm Kyhn, who opposed looking to the French for inspiration. Drawing on Georg Brandes, Groth argued that each period sets its own demands and that Realism was the right goal for contemporary Danish artists. This brought him into contact with the Bogstaveligheden, or Literalists, a group of radical intellectuals who met between 1880 and 1882 to discuss art and literature.

His best works are generally believed to be those painted along the shores of Lillebælt and at Hellebæk. In 1874 his painting Hede med en Mose (Heath with a Bog) was acquired for the Royal Collection. Among his best-known paintings are Two Young Girls in the Autumn Woods, Summer Day on a Forest Road and Quiet Day on the Northern Part of Lake Esrum.