A horse startled by a rooster.

Painted in 1926, when Valdemar Irminger was 75 years old, this charming scene captures a moment of comic panic between two farmyard animals. Irminger had long included animals within his broader repertoire of portraits, soldiers, religious subjects, and children, and by the mid-1920s he was working firmly within the Romantic tradition he had embraced since the 1890s. The subject, a horse thrown into alarm by something as small and unlikely as a rooster, carries a gentle wit that suits an artist celebrated for his sensitivity toward living creatures. The contrast in scale between the two animals gives the composition its drama, a massive, muscular horse undone by a strutting bird.

Irminger spent decades exhibiting at Charlottenborg and was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, so by the time this work was made he was a deeply experienced observer of both human and animal character. His earlier open-air paintings at Refsnæs showed a gift for capturing unguarded, spontaneous moments, and that same quality seems to carry through here. There is something almost theatrical about the scene, the rooster crowing with full conviction, the horse rearing or shying in genuine fright. Irminger would have been well acquainted with academic animal painting traditions, but the humor and lightness of this subject feel entirely personal.