Skagen's Museums have a work by Schønheyder Møller with the same motif, which is dated 1891–1893, the years the artist was in Skagen (Skagens Museer inv. no. 506). The present painting must thus be a repetition painted the same year that he settled in Fontainebleau.

'Le peintre du soleil' – the painter of the sun. This was the poetic and concise moniker given to Schønheyder Møller by the French author and art critic Leon Bazalgette in the preface to the artist's retrospective exhibition at the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Liege in 1908, three years after his untimely death in 1905. It is a very beautiful characterisation and is telling of Schønheyder Møller's efforts to reproduce the sun and its light as it appears on the retina of the eye in a multitude of flickering spots in red, purple, orange and yellow shades when viewed directly up against the sun against the background of a blue sky (see catalogue no. XX), or through the trees of a forest (The National Gallery of Denmark inv. no. KMS8079), or when the light is reflected off the surface of the sea surface (see catalogue no. XX), and the surrounding landscape almost dissolves, losing its shape. Shortly after his death, the works of Schønheyder Møller received great interest from abroad, including at the above-mentioned exhibition in Liege, as well as in Berlin, London, Budapest, Stockholm and as far away as Cape Town. Because of this early international interest, some of his works are now located abroad.

Subsequently, Schønheyder Møller was all but forgotten, and it has largely been like this until today, where we once again see a strong interest in the artist and his works. Currently, his work is on display at the exhibition “Fremkaldelser. Vilhelm Hammershøi, Valdemar Schønheyder Møller og fotografiet” (Emergences. Vilhelm Hammershøi, Valdemar Schønheyder Møller and Photography) at the Hirschsprung Collection, and his artistic significance is thus being highlighted.

Not much is known about the artist. As the above exhibition illustrates, he was a very close friend of Vilhelm Hammershøi, and they were both greatly interested and fascinated by photography. They were both some of the first artists in Denmark to work consciously with photography, which among other things also explains Schønheyder Møller's great pictorial interest in light.

Schønheyder Møller was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1883, but already in 1884, he left the academy to instead follow P. S. Krøyer's teachings at Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler (The Free School of Study for Artists). Here he was a student together with Vilhelm Hammershøi, and they became very close friends. Schønheyder Møller took many of the photographs that are connected to Hammershøi's famous works, and he had his own small photo studio. In the early 1890s, he was in Skagen several times, where Anna Ancher, among others, grew fond of both Schønheyder Møller himself and his work as an artist, and in 1893 she painted his portrait – her only contribution to the famous portrait frieze of artists in the Brøndum hotel's dining hall. As newlyweds, Schønheyder Møller and his wife moved to Paris in 1894, and in 1896 they settled in Fontainebleau, where he painted many of his beautiful sun paintings, which gave him the moniker ‘le peintre du soleil’.

For much of his life, Schønheyder Møller was plagued by unstable mental health, and in 1901 he became so ill that he had to stop painting and admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital in Aarhus. Here he died in 1905 only 41 years old.