Landscape with hills near Jyderup.

Painted in 1878, when Irminger was just 27 years old and still exhibiting regularly at Charlottenborg, this landscape captures the rolling terrain near Jyderup, a small town in western Zealand. At this stage in his career, Irminger was working firmly within the Realist tradition he had trained in at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied from 1867 to 1873. The Danish landscape painters of this era were deeply invested in capturing the quiet, unspectacular beauty of their home country, and Jyderup's modest hills gave Irminger exactly the kind of unheroic subject matter that suited that sensibility. This is not a grand Alpine panorama or a romanticized pastoral fantasy. It is a patient, honest look at a particular stretch of Danish countryside.

Irminger would later shift toward Romanticism in the 1890s and become known especially for his warmly observed paintings of children, including his celebrated works at the Refsnæs children's hospital. But this early landscape shows the disciplined eye he brought to observation before sentiment entered his work more fully. Jyderup sits in a part of Denmark where the land undulates gently rather than dramatically, and whatever Irminger found compelling here was found in subtlety, in the quality of light and the slow rhythm of the hills rather than in any spectacular natural event.