Exhibited: Charlottenborg 1922 no. 542.

Oda Peters, née Børgesen, received her artistic education at Teknisk Skole (Technical College) and then at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1912 to 1916. In 1919, she married the architect Harald Peters (1891–1951) and the couple moved to Esbjerg, where Oda Peters took an active part in the city’s art scene. After her divorce in 1933 she moved to Dragør, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Peters painted in a modern simplistic style with strong colours and contour lines, and her favorite motifs were, among other things, still lifes and landscapes – both the Danish landscape around her home cities Esbjerg and Dragør and the southern landscapes that she experienced on her travels to Germany, Italy, and Paris. She also made several figure paintings, including a number of large-format mythological motifs such as the present painting, which depicts a part of the New Testament story of Herod Antipas, whose stepdaughter Salome dances before him at his birthday feast and in return receives the head of John the Baptist on a platter – a story popularized by Oscar Wilde’s tragedy Salome from 1891 and Richard Strauss’ opera of the same name from 1905.