Exhibited: Charlottenborg, “Bertha Wegmanns Mindeudstilling“, October 1926, no. 152.

This is not the first time that Bertha Wegmann has dealt with the motif of tall, slender tree trunks in the forest. In “Young woman in a forest” (private collection) from 1885, a young woman is seen walking towards the distant light on a dark forest path surrounded by tall pine trunks, and in ”A young girl in a forest (Toni Möller)” (The Hirschsprung Collection) a young girl is placed in the very foreground, surrounded by the tall, slender trees of the forest (both ill. in Gertrud Oelsner & Lene Bøgh Rønberg (eds.), “Bertha Wegmann”, 2022, pp. 117 and 154). In the present painting there are no figures only the path that leeds deeper into the forest towards a dim delicate light.

Provenance: Sophie Alberti (1846–1947) known as a women's rights champion and she performed several important tasks for the cause - one of them as chairman of Kvindelig Læseforening (the Women's Reading Association) in the years 1891–1929. In this capacity, she errected a new building for the association, complete with a library, meeting rooms, a lecture hall, classrooms, a reading room, and a guesthouse on the address 'Gammel Mønt 1' in Copenhagen. In 1913 Sophie Alberti had her portrait painted by Bertha Wegmann.