In 1885, Schønheyder Møller attended Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler (The Free School of Study for Artists) under Peder Severin Krøyer. Schønheyder Møller was not yet known as 'Le peintre du soleil' - the painter of the sun - as he would later be dubbed by the French author and art critic Leon Bazalgette, but he was already at this time strongly preoccupied and fascinated by the sun and light, as is also clearly evident from this fine work.

It is a quiet and poetic painting, in which Schønheyder Møller experiments with how the backlight from the sun falls through a winter landscape with bare trees and winter-white surfaces. The motif and composition are also inspired by Japanese woodcuts, which many other artists of his time used as sources of inspiration. The forest in the background disappears in a haze of light and delicate pastel colours. Against this background, a few slender tree trunks emerge almost like calligraphy with only a few autumn-coloured orange-brown leaves remaining. The artist has highlighted some of the branches by scratching them deeper into the surface of the painting, just as Laurits Andersen Ring did. The long light-blue shadows of the bare trees and the sun's bright reflections on the frosted white pastose-painted surface of the foreground form a very visible contrast to the delicately thin and more watercolour-like background.

The light is thus already at this point the main motif in Schønheyder Møller's work.

Shortly after his death, the works of Schønheyder Møller received great interest from abroad at different exhibitions in Liege, 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. His work has just been 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.