IN THE STATE OF DENMARK 161 



Down in Copenhagen art schools flourisli, the 

 Government school for women, presided over by Herr 

 Johannsen and Froken Krebs, being a pattern to all 

 others of its kind. Its fee is about six shillings a 

 month, and in cases of real poverty students pay no 

 fee whatever. The school itself is splendidly large, 

 airy, and brilliantly clean, points which those who 

 have worked in Paris ateliers will know how to appre- 

 ciate. On the day on which Froken Krebs took us 

 into it, there were three models posing in the large 

 room and one in a smaller room ; there was certainly 

 no stint of variety and space, and much of the work 

 showed a truth and simplicity of colour and a strength 

 of drawing not often found in schools of older standing. 

 The care spent on the surroundings seemed to have 

 its reflection in the fresh and serious faces of the 

 students ; there was none of the soulful pallor and 

 dingy intensity familiar elsewhere as the trade-mark 

 of that type of art student whose resolve to look 

 unconventional is the outcome of her ingrained 

 British love of convention, whose surroundings have 

 just sufficient incoherence to find recognition under 

 the greasy banner of Bohemia. Froken Krebs alone 

 knows what long and hardy efforts were neces- 

 sary before the Government school for women was 

 achieved ; what interminable sessions of Parliament ; 

 what innumerable letters and audiences ; what laby- 

 rinths of red tape. Except in later years, women 

 have been little accounted of in Denmark; ladies 

 were the object of that chivalry that would shield 

 them as far as possible from earning any money for 

 themselves, while it accepted the fact that other 

 women worked in cellars and slept in garrets, and did 

 the same work as men, at a lower wage. But in spite 

 of prejudice, in spite of the vapid maxims on which 

 women of the upper classes have been nourished, 



M 



