Scene from Kipling's The Jungle Book.

Valdemar Irminger painted this scene from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book in 1908, the same year he married the sculptor Ingeborg Plockross and was appointed professor at the Royal Danish Academy's school for women. By this point in his career, Irminger had moved well away from the Realist style of his early years and was working in a more Romantic vein, which made him a natural fit for Kipling's lush, mythologized vision of the Indian jungle. The Jungle Book had been published in 1894 and sparked an immediate fascination across Europe, giving painters and illustrators rich material to work with. Irminger was especially known for his sensitivity when painting children, having won two Academy medals in the late 1880s for his paintings of young patients at the Refsnæs children's hospital. That instinct for portraying childhood with warmth and psychological depth would have drawn him to Mowgli's story in particular.

Irminger spent three years in Italy on scholarship during the 1880s, developing a feel for warm, saturated light that shows up in his best open-air work. His Romantic turn meant that by 1908 he was comfortable with the kind of atmospheric, creature-filled wilderness Kipling described. Whether the painting centers on Mowgli among the wolves, his confrontation with Shere Khan, or the hypnotic Kaa, Irminger brings a storyteller's eye to the scene, balancing the wildness of the jungle with the human drama at its center.