The Daily Valdemar No. 29, April 10
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| Valdemar, printed in the daily Politiken, July 12, 1908. |
Josty was an outdoor café in Copenhagen just around 1900 specializing in patries. It was a place to enjoy life on an urban summer's day, when it was finally sufficiently warm to sit outside, while making certain to be seen doing so the fashionable way. Valdemar has portrayed life composing itself within the structure laid out by the café garden. He chose to stretch the path to the pavilion giving it the longest possible angle in which everybody would have room to place themselves along it in their layers of life on the path to life's pleasures.
Edvard Munch had been experimenting with layers of life along a dramatically angled bridge right after 1900. Valdemar rarely drew elderly women in his street scenes, but we have a young woman wondering at her daughter, while she is turning from what could be her own mother. The grandmother has a knowing smile, while the young granddaughter is already testing the limits and possibilities of her life.
The girl is mirrored in the little boy, and they are anchored in their own world of mutual curiosity, while everyone around them are chatting, flying, running, wrangling children and correcting their clothes and all of it to a degree that a servant is about drop his tray stepping on a toddler, who is in turn screaming its head off.
Valdemar and his family were living right around the corner from Josty in a flat right underneath the roof. The flat was flooded with light for Valdemar's work, but on a hot summer's day it would grow too warm to stay inside. July 1908 was the summer too in which Juliane would take their son in his pram to Josty for him to nap, while she was reading the newest novel in town.
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