The four painters are, from the left, Jens Søndergaard himself, Erik Hoppe, Niels Bjerre and Niels Lergaard. Søndergaard, Lergaard and Hoppe had met in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in 1920 and were all interested in landscape painting. The trio make up the central group in the “dark painters”, who made their mark on figurative, Danish art in the 1920s and 1930s. Niels Bjerre was a generation older than the other three artists, but he was also a landscape painter. He was important to the younger painters because, like them, he almost exclusively painted the landscape he knew best: the area near Bovbjerg on the west coast, where he lived. Jens Søndergaard’s painting is done expressively, using powerful, visible brush strokes and including just the right amount of detail needed to identify the four figures. [http://www.kunsten.dk/en/work-of-art/four-painters-1759]