All Saints' Day. A widower in a cemetary for the poor in Rome.

Painted in 1886 during Irminger's scholarship years in Italy (1884 to 1887), this quietly devastating work captures a widower visiting a pauper's cemetery in Rome on All Saints' Day, the Catholic feast when families traditionally gather to honor their dead. The scene would have struck Danish audiences as both foreign and deeply human. Rome's cemeteries for the poor were stark places, far removed from the ornate monuments of the wealthy, and Irminger chose this setting deliberately to focus attention on grief stripped of any comfort or ceremony. The widower stands alone in a space that offers little consolation, making his solitude all the more acute.

Irminger was working in a Realist mode at this point in his career, before his turn toward Romanticism in the 1890s. His gift for emotional sensitivity, which would later shine in his celebrated paintings of children at Refsnæs, is already present here. The painting belongs to a broader 19th-century Scandinavian tradition of artists traveling to Italy and finding in its light and religious customs something that illuminated universal human experience. The specificity of the title, naming the day, the man's status, and the place, signals Irminger's Realist commitment to anchoring feeling in precise, documented circumstance.