The Art Museums of Skagen have a work by Schønheyder Møller with the same motif, which is dated 1891–1893, the years the artist was in Skagen (Art Museums of Skagen inv. no. 722). The present painting is presumably from the same period.

The old schack in the painting was inhabited by the poor married couple Stine and Per Bollerhus, who were often used as models for Anna Ancher, among others. At the present auction there are two paintings by Anna Ancher, which depict Stine Bollerhus, standing in her little schack (see cat. no. 176 and 177). The couple lived by bringing bread out to the people living in Skagen and were therefore called “the old wheat bread people”. Later, the schack was taken over by Bonatzi, who was one of Skagen's old eccentrics. After Bonatzi's death in 1913, the house was burned as a bonfire midsummer eve.

'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.

Shortly after his death, Schønheyder Møller's works attracted great interest abroad, e.g. at the above-mentioned exhibition in Liege, but also in Berlin, London, Budapest, Stockholm and as far away as Cape Town in South Africa, and therefore some of his works must today be found abroad. Subsequently, Schønheyder Møller was almost forgotten until today, where we once again see a strong interest in the artist and his works. His works have thus been on display at the exhibition “Fremkaldelser. Vilhelm Hammershøi, Valdemar Schønheyder Møller og fotografiet” at the Hirschsprung Collection in 2021.

Not much is known about the artist. As the above exhibition illustrates, he was a very close friend of Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), 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.